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Javier Prieto (Apr 29 2021 at 13:50):I'm doing some research on the corruptibility of blockchain oracles and I thought this may be a great excuse to learn about open games.
The problem is thus: blockchains need to be connected to external data in order to settle certain smart contracts. For example, if Alice and Bob want to bet on the outcome of the US presidential election, they should have a way of telling the contract who won. Relying on a trusted reporter creates a single point of failure, as this reporter could be easily bribed by parties with a stake in the contract that depends on their report. For this reason, oracles typically have several reporters and the veracity of off -chain data is adjudicated via consensus: if more than a certain fraction of the reporters agree on something, then that is the truth as far as the blockchain contracts are concerned. Moreover, reporters are incentivized not to deviate from (what they expect will be) the consensus. They get rewards if they vote with the majority or lose their stake if they don't. Examples of this general idea are Chainlink and UMA's DVM (there are many more but for now I want to focus on these two).
Let's say I want to look at the current implementation of those oracles and check how much it would cost to corrupt them under different assumptions. Does this sound like the kind of problem I could use open games for? A superficial skim of the library suggests that the consensus examples are already pretty similar to what I'm looking for, so that's encouraging. Any pointers appreciated!