Thread by @FriedWatts

$Link is one of those ideas that once you wrap your mind around the implications of it, you'll forget price but think about it constantly from a conceptual and philosophical standpoint. 

So what is it that makes $link so special? Here's a non-nerdy, sugar-coated red pill. 💊 👇

Let's start our journey into the #chainlink matrix from a simple but relevant problem today; world news. 

Imagine one day you woke up to a world-event that shocked you. Every news outlet was showing a video that featured a prominent foreign leader declaring war on your country.

As you watch in horror, your country's troops were preparing to defend and counter-attack. Videos of troop movements, wartime drafts, and political speeches filled the screen.

Over the course of weeks, confusion, panic, and uncertainty reigned. The stock market crashed. The supply chain suffered. The favored majority in the coming election lost to the underdog party, who's primary message was based on the looming threat of the very war now being waged.

Except it was all fake. The video was created by another opposing country in order to create panic and sway an election that will favor their interests - and they got their wish.

How did they create such a convincing video? Using an Ai algorithm to create what's called a #DeepFake.

Stay with me. I promise this is ultra-relevant.

A deep-fake is where a person essentially uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm that takes the face of one person and digitally stitches it onto the body of another. This is usually done in a video but can also be done in images. 

Think of it like photoshop on steroids.

The videos are so convincing that the only way you'll know it's fake is if the person that made it proves it to you that it is.

Deep Fakes are that good.

Today, deep-faking is most-commonly done in porn (shocking!) A deep faker will digitally stitch the face of a non-consenting celebrity onto a person that consented to be in a porn scene video. This essentially makes a very convincing but fake celebrity sex-tape.

The deep-fake industry has caused many lawsuits and philosophical discussions about the morality of AI and it's deep-fake application.

And it's obvious, right? Other than the obvious breach of trust that a deep fake incurs, imagine what happens when deep fakes are used to fake a political leader saying something that could get them impeached, create civil unrest, sway an election, or even start a world war.

The implications and potential for abuse of deep fakes are astounding.

The problem in its abstract form: the incentive for one party to lie to manipulate an outcome at the expense of another has never been higher or more possible to do given the digital age.

Now imagine being able to "ask" someone or something that you could trust, without doubt, whether that earlier war declaration video was real or not. 
Imagine being able to trust this source to be so completely unbiased that you could trust your entire country's future on it.

Imagine being able to verify the truthfulness of not only media, but world events, important news, documents, or anything that has a large (or small) impact.

And answer honestly, is this something you believe Google is doing or would do today? Do you believe they are showing unbiased results when you enter questions?

This is essentially what the chainlink network aims to solve: veracity. 

Yup. Truthfulness. 

So how does #chainlink aim to solve the problem of truthfulness?

in an ingenious way: economically incentivized oracles (an "Oracle" might sound fancy but just think of them as "truth tellers".)

if I may over-simplify the explanation: the protocol of the #chainlink network makes the economic cost of an oracle lying to you so high, that telling you the truth is much more profitable.

In other words, they lose money if they lie to you and make money if they tell the truth (verified by oracle consensus). 

Here's the best part: the more important the truth, the more it's worth. Conversely, the more important the truth, the more expensive it is if they lie.

In essence, the value of the truth requested is directly proportional to the value it costs to verify it. 

That means for major and important events, #chainlink oracles can stand to make or lose a LOT of money.

But that also means that the requestor gains access to the closest thing to truth we'll ever have. And that's worth something.

Now, how #chainlink verifies truth this is much more complicated than the above explanation (oracle consensus, staking, smart contracts etc) but that's the essence of the idea.

And if you've done any reading on #Bitcoin, you've probably heard this before. Bitcoin essentially secures the bitcoin blockchain by incentivizing miners to "tell the truth" about the blocks they mine thereby making it economically expensive to lie and create a double spend.

The idea isn't new but the application of it is. 

And you may be asking, what does the blockchain have to do with truthfulness and #chainlink?

(looks like I'm out of thread so I'll link to a new thread in this tweet's comments)

Why can't we just ask chainlink questions as we do with Google, get our answers, and go get a frappucino?

Right now, the answer is you can't. Chainlink only verifies data going into a given blockchain typically via something called a smart contract.

If you think about it, that's it's best and most immediate use case to prove the concept works.

Why? Because in order for the black swan of trustless, transparent, decentralized blockchains to benefit society other than by recording bitcoin transactions, blockchains need to make sure any external data they record is accurate. Enter $link.

#Chainlink helps anyone attempting to enter data onto a blockchain make sure the data they're entering is accurate. Otherwise, the "garbage in, garbage out" rule applies.

And $link can do this for any blockchain in existence. The #Chainlink network is not tied to providing data veracity to any-one chain (hence the name Chainlink).

Now it's important to note that the feature I described earlier about verifying a deep-fake or preventing world wars are NOT a feature of the chainlink network... yet.

Right now, the end goal for #chainlink is having oracles provide real-world data like transactions, news, insurance claims, legal contracts, business contracts, weather data, stock prices, etc.

But as you can see, the idea can scale into bigger societal events. 

For that reason, I predict that in the future the #Chainlink network will power verification of ALL data for ANY reason.

That's why $Chainlink is sometimes referred to as the God Protocols.

Imagine being able to read the news and guarantee an unbiased, truthful account of world events. Just imagine what that changes.

When you fully wrap your mind around what can be done, an internal paradigm shift occurs. One that has given me great hope for the future of mankind.

As of now, there are chainlink oracles providing price feeds for almost all the crypto prices in existence as well as some weather data for insurance contracts.

This may not seem like much. But for those that are paying attention, these price feeds are huge. Without a reliable price feed, the underlying truthfulness for developers to rebuild the world's entire financial infrastructure on #etherium  and other #blockchains wouldn't exist.

And with the recent emergence of #DeFi (decentralized finance), you can see it all happening in real-time and only goes to show what truthfulness can accomplish at scale.

Forgive me but I'd like to close with a bit of a platitude: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. 

 In the digital age those who can offer truthfulness are the one-eyed men

In the future, I believe #chainlink oracles will help us blind finally see the truth again