Before the advent of alternative blockchains such as Ethereum, the future of decentralization was all in the hands of Bitcoin. Together with Nakamoto itself, early developers were trying to leverage Bitcoin potential to decentralize traditionally centralized applications. However, being Bitcoin a decentralized machine, available non-trustless oracles were considered unsuitable. Therefore, strategies had to be elaborated to solve the so-called oracle problem in the newborn scenario. By interviewing early developers and crawling early forums and repositories, this paper aims to retrace and reconstruct the chain of events and contributions that gave birth to oracles on Bitcoin. The evolution of early trust models and approaches to solving the oracle problem is also outlined. Analyzing technical and social barriers to building oracles on Bitcoin, the transition to Ethereum will also be discussed.

翻译：在以太坊等替代性区块链出现之前，去中心化的未来完全掌握在比特币手中。早期开发者与中本聪本人共同致力于挖掘比特币潜力，旨在将传统中心化应用去中心化。然而，作为去中心化机器，比特币可用的非信任预言机被认为并不适用。因此，必须制定策略以解决这一新生场景中所谓的预言机问题。通过采访早期开发者并爬取早期论坛与代码仓库，本文旨在回溯并重构催生比特币预言机的事件链与贡献脉络。本文同时勾勒了解决预言机问题的早期信任模型与方法的演进过程。通过分析在比特币上构建预言机所面临的技术与社会障碍，本文还将讨论向以太坊的过渡。