A confluence of events, combined with a healthy obsession for details and a love of writing, gave computer scientist Ari Juels just what he needed to produce his second fiction thriller.

Juels, the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, spent much of the pandemic-forced lockdown and a coincidental sabbatical writing “The Oracle,” his new novel about a software developer who, along with his FBI partner, race against time to dismantle a murderous blockchain program launched by the Delphians, worshippers of the ancient Greek god Apollo.

Juels – also a computer science faculty member in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science – tells the story from an expert perspective: The technology described (often in great detail but for a general audience) is based heavily on research he and his research group are doing at Cornell Tech’s Roosevelt Island campus.

“Much of my research for the book didn’t involve what many novelists do – that is, reading scholarly publications – but instead I was writing those publications,” Juels said. “Part of the fun of ‘The Oracle’ is that I was, and am, living the research in the novel.”

This is Juels’ second foray into the literary world. His first was the 2010 computer security thriller, “Tetraktys,” which, like “The Oracle,” combines Greek history and modern-day technology in a tale of mysterious computer break-ins, international intrigue and corruption.

Juels talked with the Chronicle about his new novel:

Question: Is this a cautionary tale? Your author’s note at the beginning of the book reads like a warning of sorts.

Answer: Most certainly. At its heart, the story is a cautionary tale about haphazardly fusing technologies – in this case, blockchains with artificial intelligence, specifically large language models such as ChatGPT. The scenario in the book involves a blockchain technology called smart contracts automatically paying bounties for murders. AI plays a role here by interpreting news articles to adjudicate payment. The novel is near-future sci-fi, but the technologies it describes are here now and its premise is technologically plausible. Happily, smart contracts like the one in The Oracle aren’t possible with today’s infrastructure and I think colleagues in the community are taking the future risks seriously.

Q: This book is based on a 2015 research paper you co-wrote; how much other research did you do in the writing of the book?

A: The technology part of the book is based heavily on our research, including a 2015 paper and a number of others – some of which have seen the light of day as blockchain technologies in use today. I did have to do a fair amount of research in the old-fashioned way – reading books and articles – for the other aspects of the book, especially the history of the Oracle of Delphi.

Q: What are the biggest dangers of blockchain/cryptocurrency/smart contracts and the like?

A: There are two dangers: the rock and the hard place, if you will. On the one hand, blockchain technologies, like all technologies, are dual-use and can be abused in all kinds of ways. That includes scams, like FTX – the exchange run by the now infamous Sam Bankman-Fried – and criminal uses, both of the kind that are common today and those that might occur in the future, like the one in my novel. Those are a clear, present and evolving danger.

But on the other hand, there’s also the danger of overreaction or misconceptions about the downsides of the technology. For instance, I worry that people, especially politicians, will conflate the frothy and sometimes silly side of crypto – think dog-themed coins and other meme coins – with the deep and powerful blockchain technology that crypto has given rise to. The result could be that a promising and rapidly evolving technology is quashed in its infancy. So in short, the dangers I worry about are abuse and neglect.

Q: History and its ties to the present are evident in both of your novels; what is your fascination with the ancients?

A: In general, I find the vantage point of the ancient world an immensely insightful way to understand the modern one. When it comes to ancient Greece in particular, though, my fascination is with a kind of miracle: This tiny community, over a short span of time, was responsible for the birth of theater, philosophy, accurate depiction of the human body, and democracy – just to name a few of the outcomes of the creative explosion there. To me, this is a recurring source of wonder.

Q: How has fiction writing informed or changed your academic writing, if at all?

A: Not much. Academic writing is so constrained by the standards and conventions of the academic community that there isn’t much opportunity for real stylistic experimentation. One example: A colleague of mine and I published a paper way back when in which we cited the popular cookbook “The Joy of Cooking.” We were chastised by reviewers for what they felt was an insufficiently scholarly citation. That’s just how hidebound some parts of the community are.

I see fiction as a way to ask important what-ifs for which there’s little room in academic circles. It’s also a way, I hope, to popularize technological ideas for non-technologists – and in this case, to draw attention to all of the wild and visionary things happening in the blockchain world that are so rarely written about.

The post Ari Juels Publishes New Crypto-Thriller Novel appeared first on Cornell Tech.

The team from Cornell Tech has written a new primer that makes several recommendations for how to avoid this dysfunctional, dystopian future. This includes:

• creating smart contracts for NFT distribution that function like “safe documents” for startups
• automated processes for vetting NFT buyers and preventing market manipulation by bots, including purchase limits and sales restrictions for certain auctions
• innovative royalty-payment structures that offer commissions or other financial incentives to NFT artists

“While there have been many pieces exploring NFTs recently, we believe this paper is the first true exploration of NFTs as an extension and transformation of the contemporary fine art market,” says lead author Sarah Allen, the research program manager for Cornell Tech’s Initiative for CryptoCurrency and Contracts (IC3).

The paper was co-written by Cornell Tech professors Ari Juels and Mukti Khaire, IC3 research engineer Tyler Kell, and researcher Siddhant Shrivastava of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Juels is a blockchain researcher who also serves as Chief Scientist of Chainlink Labs, a top 25 cryptocurrency with a $6.6b market cap, while Khaire is a business professor with expertise in traditional art markets. The work was based at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech.

Smart Contracts

In the world of venture funding, investors and lawyers have pulled together standardized “safe documents” as an inexpensive way to close an investment so that both parties are reasonably protected. Juels says that a similar set of smart contracts for distributing and reselling NFT artworks could protect participants from the challenges arising in what is today a largely unregulated market.

Over time, a more ambitious system is perhaps possible, for instance, an engine that allows artists to tailor contracts to their specific preferences, but with strong guardrails in terms of legal enforceability.

Automated Buyer-Vetting

Allen and her colleagues say that the bot-driven nature of the NFT marketplace means that art sellers will have to get more creative in vetting buyers to make the purchasing process more egalitarian for us non-algorithms. Some ways to do this include:

• discounts for established NFT artists
• “fair drops” of new work (e.g., limiting purchases to one piece per buyer to
  prevent accumulation by bots)
• in some cases, restricting sales to buyers who have previously purchased works that meet certain criteria (e.g., selling only to buyers who already own works by a given artist)

​​Innovative Royalty Structures

The team argues that the NFT art market will provide more autonomy for artists if it continues to offer robust royalty structures for creators. For example, DADA.nyc pays NFT artists a 30 percent commission for resales of their work – a key way for artists to financially profit after their initial purchase. A similar structure was attempted in the traditional art market with “droit de suite”, but enforcement has been impractical and only attempted in a few countries. In contrast, NFT royalty payments are borderless and enforceable for all transactions.

Some companies get even more inventive: Eulerbeats, for example, created a set of NFT artworks with a limited number of copies (“prints”) and sold them to generate a royalty paid to the owner of the original NFT.  Rather than reselling prints, owners also have the option of sending them to a contract that “burns” them and pays a reward for reducing the overall supply.

The researchers say that we’re really only at the beginning in terms of the kinds of royalty structures that could incentivize artists, buyers, and sellers. For instance, they imagine a future NFT collection that adds a bit of a gambling component, in which all royalties are awarded by lottery to one randomly selected owner of a piece from the collection.

Researchers at Cornell Tech and elsewhere are working to design systems to enable a fair, forward-looking NFT art market. For example, this spring Juels and colleagues collaborated with digital artist Zach Lieberman to demonstrate an auction system that uses decentralized identity technology to ensure “fair drops” of NFTs (i.e. one person, one entry).

“That raffle was a key first step in showing that we can limit the dominance of bots as artists sell their work,” says Allen. “More tools like this will be required to ensure that the NFT art market fulfills its full promise rather than becoming a dysfunctional, undemocratic dystopia.”

Related Links

Paper: “NFTs for Art and Collectibles”
IC3
Ari Juels
Mukti Khaire

The post Three Ways to Save the NFT Art Market From Disaster appeared first on Cornell Tech.

These bots aren’t new though – many were originally generated from the high-end sneaker market and in recent months have permeated the blockchain. Not only do these bots deepen inequity within the marketplace but they also ultimately manipulate the prices of the resale market. In January 2021, the Yeezy ‘Sun’ drop retailed at approximately $250, but the shoes could be found on resale sites for around $600 that same day.

In September 2021, Time Magazine launched thousands of NFTs, but their launch was taken over by scalper bots, despite precautions put in place to limit the number of NFT purchases per person. This drop also resulted in inflated transaction fees on the blockchain network.

A new tool developed by researchers at Cornell Tech, led by PhD student Yan Ji and research engineer Tyler Kell, aims to enforce a one-NFT-per-person drop policy. A successful demo took place at ETH Denver this week, where attendees established unique identities to participate in a free NFT drop with prominent digital artist Zach Lieberman.

The smart contract technology tool the team developed establishes unique identities for participants to confirm they are not bots. The tool verifies legal names from trustworthy websites such as the Social Security Administration (the data is confidentially collected and processed through a trusted execution environment so that the information cannot be accessible by anyone including the developers) or alternatively by decentralized identities based on Proof of Attendance Protocol.

“NFTs were designed to democratize the future of art-buying, but for the most part, only people whose skills are technologically advanced enough have been consistently successful at acquiring these works,” said Cornell Tech research engineer Tyler Kell. “This new technique that our team developed will allow for NFT drops to be equitable and fair and ultimately improve the market overall.”

While previous attempts at preventing bots from taking over NFT drops have included a variety of solutions that allow sellers to target a specific individual including white lists, limiting unique crypto wallets and limiting the number of purchases per person. Each of these have been circumvented in different ways, as social media accounts are not strong credentials and users can purchase accounts to get on white lists.

The researchers intend to further this work by potentially developing other desirable tools and techniques such as sophisticated collector analysis and bot identification that can be used to establish a more equitable NFT market.

The post This New Tool Prevents Bots From Taking Over NFT Drops appeared first on Cornell Tech.

See also coverage of another collaboration between Pass and doctoral candidate, Liu, “On One-way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity,” which appeared in the Chronicle.

This story originally appeared on the Cornell CIS website.

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