Pay strangers
to compute.
Prove they did.
Verifiable distributed compute, starting with the hardest case: search. Strangers run chunks in a browser tab, paid per verified chunk. Proving the work costs under 1%, not the 200% of running it three times.
The fix wasn't cryptography.
It was asking a different question.
Paying anonymous people to search something has one hard problem: the most common honest answer is also the cheapest lie.
A negative answer leaves no artifact. Nothing to check, nothing to recompute, no way to tell an hour of work from an instant reply.
cost to fake: 0.00s
Everyone else answers this by running every chunk two or three times and comparing. The buyer pays 200% extra for the privilege of not being robbed.
Now the honest answer is a specific claim with a witness attached: a seed that has to actually produce the score you reported.
cost to check: 0.7ms
There is no “nothing” left to fake, and nothing to outvote. Results get recomputed, not polled. A thousand colluding nodes fail the same check one does.
What happens to a chunk
A chunk is a unit of compute: the fixed range of candidates one contributor evaluates. Four verification layers touch every chunk, not just the interesting ones. Under-reporting and over-reporting are caught from opposite directions.
A range goes out
A contributor takes 100,000 seeds. Abandon it and the lease expires; the range goes back in the pool.
A witness comes back
The best score found, the seed that produced it, and a Merkle root over every 1,024-seed bucket along the way.
Four ways to catch a lie
Regenerate the witness. Compare against seeds we already know. Open random buckets and recompute them. Slash the stake if any fails.
Paid, and credited
Earnings accrue per verified chunk. Beat the record and the find is written on-chain, permanently, to your wallet.