Self Driving Cars and Blockchain Oracles - The Context S04E19

I recently went through the process of renewing my driving license, which made me think of two important components of our future infrastructure. One, the oracle problem: how to connect external data sources to the consensus mechanisms that blockchains offer. Second, whether this would be the last time that I needed to renew my license because, with the hopeful, rapid deployment of self-driving cars, I wouldn't need to drive myself again.

There are a lot of advantages in reforming the system that is now in place and bringing it into a more modern architecture where the certificate itself would be harder to forge, verifying it would be more secure and definitive. updating it with additional skills would be fast and reliable. And many many other points that are satisfied by a blockchain implementation of this particular certificate, the driving license, and many others as well. An important only partially solved problem is what in the blockchain world is called the oracle problem. The world’s messy information of uncertain reliability, or even where people actively try to inject false information into systems to gain an unfair advantage, must be evaluated, normalized, before being used in a blockchain system. In my case, for example, that I still have to wear glasses to drive.

I feel that it is likely this will be the last time for me to renew my driver's license. Self driving cars will be widespread by that time. And the next time after the license expires, if I want to drive, I will do it in a closed circuit. I will maybe drive a race car and it will be risky.I will have special insurance paying a high premium just for that hour or so of entertainment. But as far as moving around, my ability to reach my destination safely and securely and on time will be delegated to the machines. Of course, these machines and their abilities will be also checked and verified and certified and certifiable on blockchains with oracles bringing the data from the outside world onto the blockchain in a much more reliable way, with machine communication, updating on a real-time basis.