Beyond monetary transfers, Ethereum also reaches consensus on the outcome of computations on a global virtual computer that executes programs called smart contracts. Smart contracts can perform any computation you give them - they are Turing-complete in other words. However, they can't operate on data unless it's in the virtual machine's memory and for good reason, the machine cannot access the Internet to get new information. As such, smart contracts cannot take action based on real-world occurrences unless they somehow are written into the virtual machine's memory. Oracles are trusted entities that do exactly that. Existing oracles suffer from several limitations: some are centralized, some trust secure hardware, some trust websites to behave honestly. This talk presents Astraea, a work-in-progress decentralized oracle that leverages human intelligence to achieve decentralization with high-accuracy outcomes. The system is based on voting, with users falling into two complementary roles with differing incentives. Ultimately, assuming one of the groups is sufficiently honest and knowledgeable, it is simple to compute the cost of an attack against the system and the probability of such an attack succeeding. Further, it is possible to and set the system's parameters to render an attack infeasible.

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