Pyth is designed as a decentralized protocol to avoid single points of failure. An obvious way to build an oracle is to run a server somewhere that collects data, aggregates it, and sends it to the blockchain. The problem with this approach is that the server is a centralized single point of failure. If that server goes down, the oracle does too. Also, the owner of the server could manipulate the results. That tradeoff is unacceptable for oracle users who demand security and reliability.

The election is a referendum on the American ruling class. The ruling class consists of both Democrats and Republicans. Their interests are the policies that both parties support. Every administration supports foreign wars. Every administration supports key corporate interests, including the pharmaceutical industry and the banks. There’s very little difference between Bush and Obama: they both started a bunch of wars, they both expanded free trade, they both passed healthcare legislation without solving the drug cost problem, etc. The policies of our ruling class have hurt the people of this country. The people don’t want to fight wars in the Middle East – these have nothing to do with our defense, and they’ve bankrupted the country. Free trade has eliminated industry and people’s livelihoods. The 2008 crisis response further drove wealth inequality. We have the world’s largest healthcare spending and yet worse life expectancy than countries that spend half as much. We’ve lost the chance at building a peaceful world post Soviet Union and instead are at the brink of nuclear war. We’ve gone from being a rich productive country to one whose key export is financial instruments – this is a pending disaster that will impoverish us (regardless of administration) over the next decade as the world dedollarizes. The vast majority of the American people see that the ruling class doesn’t support their interests, and they’re angry. They’ve been angry since 2008, and we’ve seen this anger manifest in different ways: Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, and of course, Donald Trump. These movements are nominally left vs. right, but this is not the distinction that matters. They’re populist movements with the same underlying cause. Instead of responding to popular anger by actually helping the people, the ruling class has ruthlessly suppressed these challenges to its power. They rigged the Democratic primary in 2016. They created fake Russian interference theories to impeach Donald Trump, then did it again to suppress the legitimate evidence of corruption against Trump’s opponent in 2020. There are no bounds to their corruption and falsehood: the ruling class will do whatever it takes to hold on to power. In their quest for power, the ruling class has destroyed the legitimacy of our society’s institutions. Government agencies and the media are no longer trusted because they have consistently lied to the public. They have politicized law enforcement and used it as a weapon against their enemies, destroying rule of law. (Hillary is still claiming the 2016 election was stolen – where’s her court case?) They’ve created a vast censorship complex of government agencies and NGOs for combating “misinformation” on the internet, which is a direct attack on freedom of speech. This loss of legitimacy is extremely dangerous, and demonstrates the extent to which the ruling class will go to hold on to power. Ironically, as these attacks have escalated, they have actually helped @realDonaldTrump . In their desperation to stop him, the ruling class has escalated to increasingly obvious lies and corruption. The flagrant lies are waking people up – the gap between the lie and reality is simply too large to be ignored. If you listen to the media describe Trump, then listen to Trump himself, you instantly realize that the media has lied to you. The lie is so flagrant that it completely destroys the media’s credibility – you realize they simply do not care about the truth, and never have. It’s like seeing the matrix – it snaps you to a new interpretation of reality, where you see everything in a new light. It’s Wittgenstein’s ruler (“When you use a ruler to measure the table, you are also using the table to measure the ruler”) and you realize the ruler has been wrong the whole time. (Tangentially, the previous paragraph explains many of the so-called “mysteries” of the election. You periodically see the media wonder “how can all these people support a racist convicted felon who’s literally Hitler?” Well, there’s your answer – every time the media attacks Trump, they’re actually attacking themselves.) By surviving, Trump has attracted a counter-elite. All the people he’s touring with – @TulsiGabbard , @RobertKennedyJr , @JDVance , @VivekGRamaswamy , @elonmusk – are the counter-elite. It’s an assorted cast of characters, but the common theme amongst them is that they stand against one or more interests of the ruling class. Tulsi is anti-war, Elon is pro-free-speech, etc. This counter-elite is the seed of a new ruling class. Thus, the election is ultimately a choice between ruling classes. Do you want to stick with Hillary and Cheney? Or do you want to try something new? This is a freak event – few people have Trump’s survival skills – and you’ll never get another opportunity in your lifetime. Choose carefully.

The challenge for building OIS on Solana is to make it crankless. Every user's staking account state becomes stale over time. How do you keep the account states fresh without submitting a transaction on every single epoch? The staking program tracks an event log for each pool and automatically fast-forwards the account state whenever the user interacts with it. The log is a circular buffer to keep the account size bounded. It simplifies the ongoing operation.