Yea I feel like the more motivating image would be to show both people at the end showing how both consistent and inconsistent efforts can get you to the same goal

The burden on me was just to point out that when someone is looking for a way to create decentralized trust in a system of decentralized work that the solution is blockchain. My point in the first comment wasn’t to hash out all the nuanced details of how that would work in practice, I was just pointing out that if your looking to create trust in a decentralized system then the best (and honestly only) way to do that is blockchain.

You don’t need to put any model information on the blockchain. The goal of the blockchain is that it’s creating a network of trust tied to computational work. All we want from the blockchain is to be able to say we trust this node and it’s providing work. There are many ways you can then go about setting that up and debate the nuanced details of what will work best. But the utility of blockchain is pretty simple - we want decentralized work, we want decentralized trust. Blockchain is the only technology that does that. In fact blockchain is really just a synonym for those two things. So on your first post when you questioned how we would be able to trust this decentralized work, the answer to that is simple - blockchain. The details past that have million dollar answers but the underlying principle is pretty straight forward.

> And that tells us nothing about whether that worker returned the "correct" result, or a manipulated one.

It actually does. A worker that creates a fake block would need a consensus of the nodes on the chain to verify that block to get it added. That’s precisely how blockchain technology creates trust - it has nothing to do with the ledger being public, but is about having a consensus of nodes verifying the cryptographic signature on a block before adding it to the chain and then growing along that consensus chain so that eventually it’s computationally insurmountable to reverse the direction of the chain back to the fake block you are trying to create.

The most obvious solution with respect to our discussion here is requiring that every node validates the finding. Easy to understand how that system could create a trusted system but obviously it’s useless. So alternatively could make validators just validate that your in a local minimum while the original validation tries to evaluate a more global feature space. Or an alternative option like I said before is to have more local validation sectors where you trust people in your local network because of confirmed results.

And I’m not trying to say I have the solution here, but I think it’s pretty obvious that blockchain technology solves these problems with just some tinkering around with the mechanisms of consensus’s and chain building.

Blockchain technology would absolutely accomplish the issue of trusting your workers. Why else do people invest millions in mining rigs? Because of a system of decentralized trust built on the blockchain, where they won’t gain any benefit from trying to create fake/malicious blocks. It would both incentivize people to donate their resources and create a cryptographically secured system so you can trust the results you are getting. You don’t need everyone on chain to rerun the analysis, that’s just one form of validation. All you need is a system of nodes that trust other local nodes through periodic validation. It may require more resources but you’ve solved both the issue of trust and incentivizing work which will negate any increased burden that the periodic repeat validation requires.

Interesting that a lot of those problems could be solved by an implementation run on a blockchain. Wondering if anyone knows of efforts that have tried that?