I'd agree that it is more centralized than I'd like, but it doesn't defeat the whole point. Gridcoin has a different purpose than most cryptocurrencies. It rewards science and is more decentralized than most coins that try similar goals [1]. I'd also note that the oracles have less direct power over the coin than you might think. See one of the comments I made about it earlier [2]
The alternative was previously flooding every project and downloading a massive gigabytes of data from the projects. It wasn't maintainable and a project left from the large amount of bandwidth it used up. As Gridcoin grew, it became a larger and larger issue. As well, some projects are now requiring tokens to access the stats (for GDPR reasons), so for some project, it became impossible to reward them without anything like this
> ...seeming to be a buzzword that tries to provide some technical legitimacy...
I'd also note that most things about Gridcoin usually doesn't use the term oracle (uses scrapers instead). I was using it here since I thought it would be a term more here were familiar with
Sorry I can't buy the idea. Once you have some oracle, you have more centralization than a properly decentralized currency. And then you end up with the worst of both worlds: as expensive and slow as a cryptocurrency, and as trust-dependent/weak as a centralized system (weak in the sense that there's a single point of failure and a single entity that you must trust).
Anything that can only be done with some degree of centralization should just use a PostgreSQL database instead, no point in using a blockchain.
It's not a single oracle. There are currently 6 that independently run and gather the same stats. The wallet compares each of those independent oracle's data to each other and makes sure it matches. There will almost certainly be more oracles in the futures
> Anything that can only be done with some degree of centralization should just use a PostgreSQL database instead, no point in using a blockchain.
You get more resiliency in running it through a blockchain. You would go from oracles having to coordinate in a tricky way to manipulate stuff to now being able to having a database where they could somewhat easily directly change balances, stop things from running, ect.
A blockchain has some degree of centralization. For instance, how the very first peers found in blockchains is fairly centralized and relies on a lot of hardcoded nodes or servers. Now you can also seek out some connection too manually if you really want to, but most* have decided not to do that and accepted the trade off. Everything has a degree of centralization. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It is where you want to move on the balance of completely centralization to decentralized
* Partly because many aren't aware of this, but it still applies to those that are aware too
The alternative was previously flooding every project and downloading a massive gigabytes of data from the projects. It wasn't maintainable and a project left from the large amount of bandwidth it used up. As Gridcoin grew, it became a larger and larger issue. As well, some projects are now requiring tokens to access the stats (for GDPR reasons), so for some project, it became impossible to reward them without anything like this
> ...seeming to be a buzzword that tries to provide some technical legitimacy...
I'd also note that most things about Gridcoin usually doesn't use the term oracle (uses scrapers instead). I was using it here since I thought it would be a term more here were familiar with
[1] https://gridcoin.us/wiki/advantages-and-features.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240413