On decentralized oracles for data availability

Abstract

Nakamoto consensus, the protocol underlying Bitcoin, has the potential to secure a new class of systems which agree on non-mathematical truths. As an example of this capability, we propose a design for a trustless, data availability oracle. This exposition reduces the problem of determining whether or not a registered datum is publicly available to the problem of constructing a network in which either almost all nodes can download a given datum, or almost none of them can.