How to represent ‘real life’ entities

inside blockchainsStefano Bertolo

stefano@ethereum.org @sclopit

Things that exist inside the blockchain

• address myAddress= ‘0x4aed8f842020e7596ad9ac7f6f0b512864c48db2'

• myAddress.balance

• now

Prediction Markets

• Contract C pays €100 if, by 31 December 2016 the Government of the UK will have invoked Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and €0 otherwise

• how much would you pay for contract C?

• current price of contract is the collective expectation that event will occur

Intent of predictions

• Contract C pays €100 if, by 31 December 2016 Jane will be married

• Jane who?

Cospaia’s Rio 1441-1826

Augur’s solution

• Investors in the market own REP tokens

• REP token holders are asked to report on outcome (and punished if they don’t)

• market is resolved based on majority of REP token holder reports

• the ‘real’/intended Jane is a Schelling Point

Rambutan Lychee Longan

Rambutan 1,1 0,0 0,0

Lychee 0,0 1,1 0,0

Longan 0,0 0,0 1,1

A few conjectures for the future

• Payoff matrices will often be asymmetric

• player with the strongest prior investment (highest payoff) will drive convergence https://github.com/sclopit/essays/blob/master/ontopreds.md

• A Linked Data Scalability Challenge: Concept Reuse Leads to Semantic Decay http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01722

• Sound emission and reception tuning in three cicada species sharing the same habitat http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/127/3/10.1121/1.3291036