Jack Peterson

Austin K. Williams, Jack Peterson

We define and analyze three mechanisms for getting common knowledge, a posteriori truths about the world onto a blockchain in a decentralized setting. We show that, when a reasonable economic condition is met, these mechanisms are individually rational, incentive compatible, and decide the true outcome of valid oracle queries in both the non-cooperative and cooperative settings. These mechanisms are based upon repeated games with two classes of players: queriers who desire to get common knowledge truths onto the blockchain and a pool of reporters who posses such common knowledge. Presented with a new oracle query, reporters have an opportunity to report the truth in return for a fee provided by the querier. During subsequent oracle queries, the querier has an opportunity to punish any reporters who did not report truthfully during previous rounds. While the set of reporters has the power to cause the oracle to lie, they are incentivized not to do so.

Hua Lu, Jack Peterson

Verifiable secret sharing (VSS) is designed to allow parties to collaborate to keep secrets. We describe here a method of fabricating false secret shares that appear to other parties to be legitimate, which can prevent assembly of the decryption key. This vulnerability affects VSS schemes using verification commitments bounded to a finite field.

Jack Peterson, Joseph Krug, Micah Zoltu et al.

Augur is a trustless, decentralized oracle and platform for prediction markets. The outcomes of Augur's prediction markets are chosen by users that hold Augur's native Reputation token, who stake their tokens on the actual observed outcome and, in return, receive settlement fees from the markets. Augur's incentive structure is designed to ensure that honest, accurate reporting of outcomes is always the most profitable option for Reputation token holders. Token holders can post progressively-larger Reputation bonds to dispute proposed market outcomes. If the size of these bonds reaches a certain threshold, Reputation splits into multiple versions, one for each possible outcome of the disputed market; token holders must then exchange their Reputation tokens for one of these versions. Versions of Reputation which do not correspond to the real-world outcome will become worthless, as no one will participate in prediction markets unless they are confident that the markets will resolve correctly. Therefore, token holders will select the only version of Reputation which they know will continue to have value: the version that corresponds to reality.

Joseph Krug, Jack Peterson

Sidecoin is a mechanism that allows a snapshot to be taken of Bitcoin's blockchain. We compile a list of Bitcoin's unspent transaction outputs, then use these outputs and their corresponding balances to bootstrap a new blockchain. This allows the preservation of Bitcoin's economic state in the context of a new blockchain, which may provide new features and technical innovations.