“Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” — Simone Signoret

In the world of antiquity, an Oracle was a person who provided wisdom and prophetic accounts of the future. In the world of blockchain, new oracles are needed to act as arbiters that can validate or absolve smart contracts based on however their value parameters were set. The need for such an arbiter, also known as the “Oracle Problem,” raises the question of just how “smart” are smart contracts? According to programmer Jimmy Song, smart contracts really aren’t that smart at all.

Song suggests that the actual smartness of a smart contract does not derive from any real intelligence but from the extreme precision that accompanies a computer network. These contracts are written into a computer ecosystem and then later reviewed and executed based simply off the express conditions of the contract. As such, they take no account of extenuating circumstances or what Song defines as the “spirit” of law. Kate Sills has since argued that Song’s critique is misplaced because it assumes that smart contracts must be fully trustless to be valuable when that is not actually the case.

Smart contracts have existed in theory since at least 1995 when cryptographer Nick Szabo published an article titled “smart contracts” for the tech magazine Entropy. But it was only in the past year or so, with the incredible rise of Ethereum, that smart contracts have become a buzzword in the cryptography community. Ethereum, and its founder Vitalik Buterin, took the simple scope of smart contracts and built a Turing‐​complete system that allows for any user to create a more complex contract than what could be produced on the Bitcoin blockchain. But with greater complexity also comes glaring security concerns.

Complex smart contracts of the sort that could judge and execute a marriage contract based on the social and economic vows embedded within are difficult to write and even more difficult to secure and enforce. Because the onus of writing these smart contracts lie with the coders themselves (many of whom do not have the legal or technical knowledge needed to make a robust contract), holes in the code can easily lead to security flaws. Even more puzzling is devising a system that can review and critique a disputed contract.

Today, we leave those critiques up to courts, but what if smart contracts and the blockchain could perform a similar function based on the power of community instead of legal or religious authorities? During medieval times, Christians often married outside of the church and their marriages did not need to be officiated by priests or State functionaries. But if a marriage is “hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years,” then how do we determine if those contractual threads have woven together to create the hoped for fabric?

Augur and Gnosis are two cryptocurrencies attempting to find a solution to the “oracle problem.” While Gnosis hopes programmers will find an open source method to resolve this problem in the future, Augur is researching and developing a decentralized solution that allows token holders to “vote on the truth” to establish verification of an event or result. Perhaps an oracle for a smart contract could be a group or council of token holders with the ability to establish truth in relation to the contract’s standard.

Let’s imagine Mary and Jill utilize a blockchain contract for marriage. A group of witnessing peers could each hold tokens and be called upon to cast a vote on the maturation of the contract. If Mary cheats on Jill or if Jill doesn’t meet key criteria established in the marriage contract, a vote could be called for and the couple’s peers would have the ability to use their tokens to vote on voiding or amending the contract. In this way, a community of informed voters outside the legal structure of governments could confirm or deny the contractual obligations of a married couple.