Releases: PBSA/Couch-Potato
Closed Beta release for testing on Beatrice witness BOS nodes.
This first release is for the hosted version of Couch Potato only.
Introduction
BookiePro requires real-time data feeds in order to create all the various sports, events, markets etc. that are the basis of the sporting exchange. An going challenge has been getting enough of these data feeds that are accurate and reliable.
Many operations required for Bookie, such as creating a new game, require more than one approval which means that at least two data feeds send the exact same information. This is a real problem when there might only be two or three data feeds available at any given time.
Each data feed is consumed by data proxy software, operated by independent organizations, before parsing and normalizing the data and sending it through to BOS for validation, and then finally on to the blockchain.
In it's simplest form the sports data flows from data feed provider -> data proxy - > BOS - > blockchain -> BookiePro. This process is automated, which is desirable, but this brings it's own problems because there isn't enough manual validation on the data until after it fails. The automated process has little ability to correct data that is either sent from the feed provider or incorrectly normalized by the data proxy.
The idea of Couch Potato came about from looking at the process backwards. We know data comes from a feed provider, as what we see as the original source of truth. But if you go back from there who knows how many other layers there are. Does the feed provider get their data directly? Maybe they use a third party to scrape the data and then they purchase it. Maybe the data scraper uses a third party ... and so on. Ultimately though there has to be somebody watching games and inputting the data.
This is the Couch Potato concept. Why not just have a person inputting data directly into a portal or API that then gets posted directly to BOS. In this model the person is the 'data feed provider' and the API or portal the 'data proxy'.
For more information see
https://www.peerplays.tech/couch-potato/introduction
