I've been pondering the hackathon project lately, and the core mechanism revolves around "trust" and "consensus." The challenge lies in how to design a voting method that allows everyone to naturally acknowledge—"consensus."
I suddenly remembered a mini-game I played a few years ago called "The Evolution of Trust." The game is quite simple; it's just a bunch of red dots and blue dots where you choose to cooperate or deceive, and then watch how the scores change. I recall that at the beginning, if everyone acted maliciously, the 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 a central authority, why should a group of strangers trust each other? How can they achieve cooperation? Many 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.
Then I 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 design mechanisms to make "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 goal of this hackathon project is to address off-chain factual aspects; it acts like an external notary. It aims to resolve issues like "this house indeed belongs to someone" or "this document is indeed authentic." This is about the notarization of off-chain real-world facts.