Lex Fridman:   What are your thoughts about ChainLink and hybrid smart contracts that utilizes off chain external data sources?

Vitalik Buterin:  I think it is definitely necessary for smart contracts that do a lot of things to use off chain data of some kind. If you want a stable coin you want a price oracle and you know what price we are targeting. If you want to have some fancy crop insurance gadget – I think Ether has been doing a lot of good work with that and I think it was either Kenya or Srilanka or they are making a good progress in some of those places. 

Like you need some kind of oracle to tell you about did it rain actually in this particular area?  If you want to have like assets or other financial assets using Oracle, if you want prediction market you need to have an oracle.  And, so projects that provide oracles are definitely really important.

 There are definitely different kinds of use cases like Augur is more about events and the Augur oracle is designed differently than ChainLink.  ChainLink emphasizes the whole we have a fast automated thing that just gives you data quickly. Whereas Augur, we don’t give a crap about speed. We don’t need to give a crap about speed, because if you want to get money in a prediction market. In reality, it is resolved.  You just probably sell your coins for 99 cents anyway. So, I think ChainLink is definitely like taking a good and important part of the oracle design space. And, I am definitely happy that project is seeking Vitalik’s Coin.

At the same time I do think that they flogger on me on Twitter and that can get a bit intense at times. 

I personally would prefer the Ethereum base layer from trying to provide too much finality because once you have the Ethereum base layer making a claim about USD to ETH price like at some sense you are basically saying like Ethereum as a base platform starts making political standings.

Imagine if there was some civil war and the US split up and you have two currencies and you have both coins to be the USD. Ethereum will have to pick one for the sake of everyone who is already using that oracle. So, does that mean that the blockchain would be taking a position and making a major political debate.  So, I think for just those kinds of reasons, I would personally prefer Ethereum itself to be more over this sort of peer platform that just analyzes transactions just mathematically.