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I wonder if a service of oracles for smart contract (oraclize style) is corruptible. Let's say a smart contract that do some automatic action, for example, on 1 July 2018. This smart contract checks the day through an oracle service. Is it possibile that dev of the oracle service, let's assume in the event of threats or corruption, to temporarily change this data (tell to smart contract that today is July 1, 2018)?
Thank you
Yes, that is definitely possible. It is this single point of failure that inspired ChainLink, a decentralized oracle service. It doesn't make sense to have a decentralized contracting platform with a single centralized data provider, you'll have ended up back at a centralized platform. ChainLink addresses this in a number of ways, but the most basic is that it allows the data provider to have many oracles provide the data and come to consensus on an answer, so if anyone is corrupted and tries to tamper with the data it will be detected by the other oracles.
Yes, that's absolutely possible. Using some specific service is the way of centralization. Since then, you depend on it. They can pass whatever data they want.
One of the ways to solve an issue is to use multiple services and majority vote of them.
Yes, if you use a centralized oracle's service, you should trust to it. But anyway, I know one service(ChainThis) that posts to the blockchain a transaction with verification after oracle creation. In this case, they couldn't to falsificate a data or time of oracle execution. You should not trust them blindly.
