I've been pondering the hackathon project lately, and the core mechanism revolves around "trust" and "consensus." The challenge lies in designing a voting method that allows everyone to naturally acknowledge—"consensus."
I suddenly remembered a small game I played a few years ago called "The Evolution of Trust." The game is quite simple; it involves a bunch of red dots and blue dots where you choose to cooperate or deceive, and then see how the scores change. I recall that at the beginning, if everyone acted maliciously, the entire environment was particularly bad; but if one or two "good people" started to trust others, and this cooperation yielded rewards, the overall atmosphere would gradually improve. It intuitively taught me that trust is not a moral sermon but a rational choice made by everyone for long-term benefits under a good set of rules.
By researching, I came across discussions from the old mailing lists of the "cypherpunks." Those early cryptography geeks were actually grappling with the same question: in a network without central authority, why would a group of strangers trust each other? How could they achieve cooperation? Many of the cryptographic tools they discussed, such as digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs, are essentially attempts to replace our reliance on intermediaries with mathematics and code, constructing a new, "dehumanized" form of trust.
I then flipped through Robert Axelrod's book "The Evolution of Cooperation." This book provided me with a more solid foundation. It explains that even among selfish individuals, as long as the game is long-term and future benefits are significant enough, "cooperation" will become a stable strategy. Isn't this exactly what I want to achieve in this project? We do not assume that participants are all angels; instead, we create a mechanism that makes "honest notarization" the most rational choice.
The design of the Ethereum network indeed possesses the basic capability of notarization. Each block records transactions and state changes, and these records are immutable and publicly verifiable. From this perspective, Ethereum itself is a massive, decentralized notary ledger. The purpose of this hackathon project is to address off-chain facts; it acts like an external notary. It aims to solve issues like "a certain house indeed belongs to someone" or "a certain document is indeed authentic." This is about notarizing off-chain realities in the real world.