You have to take the use case of the smart-contract / app and see what is the incentive to pollute input data. Then you can use mechanism design to motivates users to input high quality data and have trustless curated list of the best data sources.
Just in case you are not familiar with cryptoeconomics and game theory, here's an example of mechanism design I used at an interview I gave a few days ago:
> Imagine you and your sister both want the last piece of cheesecake left, so you agree to split it in half but can't agree on who should do the cut because both of you are cheaters and would take the bigger slice for yourselves.
One way of solving this is to have your sister take the knife but you get to pick your half first, since you would both be motivated to find the perfect balance and would stand to lose if either tries to cheat.
Thanks for this clear example. With a combination of Token Curated Registries and a blend of bonded attestations (a la FOAM Point of Interest recording) and reputation bonds (a la Colony), you end up with economic incentives spread out across validators and other stakeholders where there is enough of a penalty for cheating to prevent it. The key is setting the bonds correctly for the use case. This is why a multipurpose smart contract ecosystem such as Stellar wins out in my book. Token Curated Registries can be used to iteratively experiment with getting the game theory and Token economics right before there's tons of money at stake.
> You have to take the use case of the smart-contract / app and see what is the incentive to pollute input data. Then you can use mechanism design to motivates users to input high quality data and have trustless curated list of the best data sources.
You have literally just described a very shit version of Chainlink.
Let me elaborate. Chainlink will make any API feed availible to trigger a smart contract. The problem is not trusting the API, its trusting the data returned from the API/Data source has not been tampered with before it triggers a smart contract.
Chainlink is offering Town Crier/SGX for offchain computation also. This means all the complicated smart contract code can now be ran off chain and save on ETH gas costs... and take computation load off ETH.
You have to take the use case of the smart-contract / app and see what is the incentive to pollute input data. Then you can use mechanism design to motivates users to input high quality data and have trustless curated list of the best data sources.
Just in case you are not familiar with cryptoeconomics and game theory, here's an example of mechanism design I used at an interview I gave a few days ago:
> Imagine you and your sister both want the last piece of cheesecake left, so you agree to split it in half but can't agree on who should do the cut because both of you are cheaters and would take the bigger slice for yourselves. One way of solving this is to have your sister take the knife but you get to pick your half first, since you would both be motivated to find the perfect balance and would stand to lose if either tries to cheat.