SCRF Terms Glossary and Content Tags

Now that SCRF is going to be hosting summit materials on the forum, I propose we have an “event” tag that can be used for all of the Smart Contract Summit 2021 posts as well as any future summits, conferences, or events that SCRF participates in and hosts content for/about on the forum.

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I’ve been going through some of our old posts, making tagging suggestions and can also see the need for an Ethics tag. A couple of other suggestions:

Incentivisation - separate from game theory in that could be more community building focused, also would cover papers like the recent one on Discussion Post: Can Gambling Increase Savings? Empirical Evidence on Prize Linked Savings Accounts
Coding - Intended for software-focused posts, such as Research Summary: Coding a DeFi arbitrage bot or Deep Diving into PRBMath, a Library for Advanced Fixed-Point Math
Hardware - this comes from the surge of interest in AI, IoT, and blockchain, and an interesting discussion in our chat about defining hardware
Keepers - an emerging area within Oracles and Hybrid contracts
Stablecoins* (which is already a term, but not a tag)

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Based on the conversation that happened on the Adding a “Hardware” category post, it looks like Hardware, AI, and ML should be included in this update. @Rich did suggest or in the original comment, but it strikes me that we would want to have all three. Does anyone from the IoT group have thoughts about adding these as tags and SCRF: Glossary entries? Would @Gearlad and/or @fmendoz7 want to move that forward?

@jasonanastas any update on the definition work needed for blockchain ethics as a tag?

Keepers would probably need some similar documentation in the glossary. Who might be interested in that?

I’m fully in support of the Stablecoins tag.

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Resurrecting the ethics tag discussion and adding a new proposed tag. Curious to know what everyone thinks about these two proposals. After some thought, I believe the ethics tag should be broad:

Proposed Tag Term Definition Source Link
cbdc Central Bank Digital Currency A centralized, digital form of central bank money that is different from balances in traditional reserve or settlement accounts. Source
ethics Ethics of Technology A subfield of ethics or moral philosophy which examines the moral and social impacts of technology and technological change. Source
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Is this potentially too narrow of a term/definition for an ethics tag? Concepts in other applied ethics disciplines (e.g. environmental ethics, engineering ethics, etc) also come up in this space…

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Perhaps. I actually thought it was potentially too broad. Any thoughts on a better defined tag that is relevant to smart contract/blockchain research?

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Suggesting the additions of “Smart Contract” and “Oracle node” to the glossary.

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Do you have recommended sources for definitions for these glossary terms? With Oracle also being an entry in the glossary, how distinct is oracle node from the concept of oracles?

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Considering how many different oracle layers/applications have been created and how they don’t all deploy nodes the same way, I think it’s definitely a relevant distinction to be made. I am looking for sources in that it was requested that I make a more detailed explanation of an “oracle node” for an upcoming summary.

Especially in light of the Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) proposal: Research Summary: Chainlink 2.0: Next Steps in the Evolution of Decentralized Oracle Networks - Oracles and Data - Smart Contract Research Forum

The notion of “oracle nodes” will be more important to articulate as DONs become more ubiquitous.

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Following up on how the search for an “oracle node” definition and explanation is going? I think that you have a good argument here that oracle node and oracles are different tags.

Smart Contract is probably needed, but it also seems to be so general or accepted that perhaps it doesn’t do much from a tagging and organization information perspective?

@jasonanastas Maybe it would help to remind us/this conversation about what the ethics tag is trying to achieve?

I think that cbdc is in a good position here. @Rich, is that ready for a PR?

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Thank you for following up on this! I actually discovered that there were various definitions of an oracle node within the space, so I have been trying to find the best and most clear definitions to give a more appropriate view of the concept. I definitely agree on the smart contract definition, but I just wanted to point it out to make sure it was known that it was an important term to start thinking about adding to the glossary. I should have a couple good definitions within the week.

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I think “ethics” might be the right tag, but there could be multiple rows with different branches of ethics OR the definition moves to expand to include these? Bias might also be a term to add?

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Part of this conversation happened earlier and there was a general sense that for the purposes of the glossary and tag, specificity is what we were after. Ethics as a tag is likely too broad. Jason had a few posts where maybe data ethics would be a useful tag, but I think we were still trying to specify what data ethics were? It seems like the Ethics of Technology concept might be getting closer, but looking at the Wikipedia link, there seems to be a lot of potential directions to go in. Maybe technoethics and the material from Luppicini (2009) that is cited in the wiki might get us to the concept that @jasonanastas is advocating for?

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Hi @jasonanastas, a much-needed addition, cheers.

Wondering if we can be more specific on the definition. I’m not sure that “…different from balances in traditional reserve or settlement accounts.” creates a meaningful distinction. Feels like there are more important nuances here. Perhaps the distinction is around who issues, authority to issue, control of monetary policy, representing as opposed to backed by Fiat, etc.

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Finally found a good definition for an oracle node that was apolitical and not developed relative to a specific oracle platform:
The Oracle - a New Intelligent Cooperative Strategy of Attacks on Trust and Reputation Systems | Janiszewski | Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, sectio AI – Informatica (umcs.pl)
"Each node in the network evaluates another known node by two measures: action
trust and recommendation trust:

  • Action trust refers to the probability that the evaluated node will perform
    the service or action with satisfactory quality for the evaluator
  • Recommendation trust refers to the probability that the evaluated node
    will deliver to the evaluator correct recommendation about action trust of
    another node"
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I think this works. It might need some paraphrasing. I do wonder if there is need for a glossary entry for Action and recommendation trust, however. Or are they inherently linked to oracle nodes that being defined by oracle nodes would be acceptable?

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I think in this context we can use those for keeping the definition protocol agnostic. Additionally, I think the sub-definitions work here but should be tentative in case something better emerges as a protocol-agnostic definition.

Thanks Rich, I 100% agree. However, that definition comes directly from the Bank for International Settlements which is the source reference and they kind of leave it at that. Would it be preferable to add to their definition for clarity?

Something that will come up pretty soon (we have about a half dozen papers about DAOs coming down the pipeline over the next few weeks): do we need to think of tags that are more specific than DAOs? One option could be using DAO as a sub-category within Governance (the way that the Auditing and Security category has Audits and Postmortem categories). But adding more specific tags might be easier – any suggestions, anyone? @jasonanastas @stephaniev @kelsienabben

Another suggestion that might apply to forthcoming summaries: Case Study or Use Case (there’s a platform analysis that used three case studies, plus a discussion of when to use a blockchain)

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@jmcgirk Just a thought here. DAOs here definitely fall mostly under governance but they also have more specific technical and social elements as well. Perhaps a more general “Society” category might solve the problem of misclassifying DAO papers that aren’t explicitly dealing with governance and coordination issues? Ethics and politics comes to mind.

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