Once there is a proper infrastructure for trusted Oracles, there will be lots of interesting applications: small group crowd funding, payment distribution from trusts,execution of wills.
While I would love for this to be a thing, most cryptocurrency enthusiasts seem to distrust anything and everyone. How would one develop an oracle trusted enough that it would be accurate while not being vulnerable to sudden betrayals? There are for example plenty of stories from Eve Online (closest example of a lawless/trustless universe) where a very trusted middleman suddenly changed behavior when the benefits became great enough.
Especially when a cryptocoin includes strong anonymity, betrayal has very low downside since no retribution would be possible. However even if such anonymity is not present, it may not be possible to get retribution if the entity on the other side is (for example) the mafia.
A blockchain can only process its own data, no external api call allowed. Unfortunately a lot of interesting applications require access to external data. Thats what oracle are for. They import external data into the blockchains, embedded in transactions. Yes it does undermine the security model of the blockchain, but they are some work arounds. For example, you can have several oracles, and you can decided to only accept data that was provided by a majority of oracles, thus rejecting outliers.
Uhh, with the risk of sounding "shilly", there is this token called chain link that is supposed to do just that, act as an oracle for data from the outside world.
With the risk of sounding "shilly", there is this token called chain link that is supposed to do just that, act as an oracle for data from the outside world.
