A while back I had an idea of how to piece together a handful of Ethereum services to create something highly automated that produces value for the general public. This composition of services is meant to illustrate what is possible with this technology.

The services involved are:

Ethereum Alarm Clock (currently kind of sad and dormant, hopefully not for too much longer)

Oraclize.it

A prediction market which crowd-sources “truth”

The idea is as follows.

Pick a market who’s outcome can be queried via some web API query, or more ideally, many different web APIs. Lets use something like “The annual rainfall in Townsville Colorado during 2018 will be greater than 40 inches”. This this market we should be able to find a number of APIs which will provide us with an objective answer.

Using the Alarm service, schedule a transaction to occur during the phase of the market where the result is being crowd-sourced. That transaction would initiate an Oraclize.it query to the chosen web API such that the response from Oraclize.it will be reported into the market.

This is admittedly an over-simplification of how the reporting mechanism for a quality prediction market would work, but it should illustrates the fundamentals of this idea. Accounting for any complexity in the actual reporting mechanism should be a solvable software problem.