Two thousand years of the oracle problem. Insights from Ancient Delphi on the future of blockchain oracles

TL;DR

This paper compares ancient Delphi oracles with modern blockchain oracles, analyzing their reliability issues and proposing strategies to enhance blockchain oracle trustworthiness using historical insights.

Contribution

It develops a comparative framework linking classical and blockchain oracles and introduces a taxonomy-based analysis of Delphic queries for improving oracle reliability.

Findings

Lexical analysis of 167 Delphic queries reveals patterns in question types.

Framework identifies commonalities between ancient and modern oracle mechanisms.

Strategies proposed for enhancing blockchain oracle security inspired by historical practices.

Abstract

The oracle problem refers to the inability of an agent to know if the information coming from an oracle is authentic and unbiased. In ancient times, philosophers and historians debated on how to evaluate, increase, and secure the reliability of oracle predictions, particularly those from Delphi, which pertained to matters of state. Today, we refer to data carriers for automatic machines as oracles, but establishing a secure channel between these oracles and the real world still represents a challenge. Despite numerous efforts, this problem remains mostly unsolved, and the recent advent of blockchain oracles has added a layer of complexity because of the decentralization of blockchains. This paper conceptually connects Delphic and modern blockchain oracles, developing a comparative framework. Leveraging blockchain oracle taxonomy, lexical analysis is also performed on 167 Delphic queries to shed light on the relationship between oracle answer quality and question type. The presented framework aims first at revealing commonalities between classical and computational oracles and then at enriching the oracle analysis within each field. This study contributes to the computer science literature by proposing strategies to improve the reliability of blockchain oracles based on insights from Delphi and to classical literature by introducing a framework that can also be applied to interpret and classify other ancient oracular mechanisms.