README.md

Erasure Protocol

Philosophy of Erasure

The Erasure Protocol builds on the three primitives of an economic relationship: Track-Record, Payment, and Recourse.

1. Track-record through Posts and Feeds
2. Payments through any cryptocurrency
3. Recourse through Griefing

Track-record through Posts and Feeds

Erasure_Post keeps track of the hash and timestamp of all the data submitted to the protocol. This serves as a proof of existence on which a track-record can be built. Creating a Post instance is as simple as submitting a multihash of your data to the smart contract. At first the data is hidden, but it can be publicly revealed at a later point by uploading it to decentralized storage. A Post will be particularly useful for one-off predictions or submissions.

Extending the concept of a Post is a Feed. A Feed allows for a user to establish credibility through an ordered history of Post committed. Since these posts are in a single append only array, it is not possible to erase or reorder them once submitted. A Feed is designed for use-cases with continuous predictions.

The hash which is submitted to the Post contract is called a proofHash. A proofHash can be generated by prepending the submitted data with a user address and a user generated salt to avoid potential impersonation or snooping attacks.

proofHash = multihash(userAddress + salt + data)

Payments through any cryptocurrency

Erasure is able to use any Ethereum-native cryptocurrencies such as ETH, WBTC and NMR within its programmable escrow smart contracts. These escrows are registered in the Erasure_Escrow registry which contributes to the single source of truth.

Recourse through Griefing

Recourse is achieved when a party is punished for wrongdoing. In the world of Erasure, this translates directly to staking and burning. When two parties decide to engage, they begin by staking NMR and agreeing on a set of conditions for punishment. We call this combination of skin in the game and rules of engagement an Erasure_Agreement.

The first type of agreement used on Erasure is called Griefing. Griefing allows a party to come to a resolution without a third party arbitrator through punishing their counterparty at a cost. This follows research in neuroeconomics which observes that cooperation evolves in populations where altruistic punishment such as griefing is possible.

Creating a Griefing agreement is as simple as having both parties agree on their respective ratio and amount at stake. The ratio represents the cost in NMR to burn 1 NMR of the counterparty. When griefing occurs, both the cost and punishment are burned from the NMR supply forever.

Take for example an agreement between Alice and Bob. Alice is anonymous and has not built a track record. She stakes 500 NMR and selects a ratio of 0.5. Bob, however, has revealed his real-world identity and has an excellent track record. As such, he stakes 100 NMR and selects a ratio of 1.

Alice = { stake = 500, ratio = 0.5}
Bob = { stake = 100, ratio = 1}
Bob punishes Alice for 10 NMR => Cost is 5 NMR (10 * 0.5)
Alice punishes Bob for 10 NMR => Cost is 10 NMR (10 * 1)
new_Alice = { stake = 490, ratio = 0.5}
new_Bob = { stake = 90, ratio = 1}

Griefing avoids relying on a centralized oracle or a trusted third party to perform arbitration over the terms of the agreement and instead allows the parties to come to a resolution on their own. As new techniques for resolution like decentralized oracles are built on Ethereum, it will be possible to add them to the set of Erasure_Agreement.

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The Architecture

Every agreement, user, entry, whatever may have its own account, and those accounts (or the factories that deploy them) can report back to simple, shared registries that establish a single source of truth for a given protocol. This grants individual agents in the system the authority to opt-in to new changes, gives rise to a diversity of options for how to interact with the system, and makes the system more decentralized.

So far, the registries developed are:

• Erasure_Agreements
• Erasure_Posts
• Erasure_Users
• Erasure_Escrows

Using the Spawner library, every item on Erasure is created as a clone of a previously deployed template. We call these Clone Factories. Every clone is also registered in a registry which provides a single source of truth on the status of the protocol.

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Deployed contracts

See latest release.