  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.
