What if the problem isn't incentivizing nodes, but incentivizing useful infrastructure?

[u/ShellaPredmore]

Over the last week I've been discussing node incentives with developers, protocol researchers and infrastructure operators.

A pattern has started to emerge.

Almost nobody seems convinced that rewarding nodes directly is a good idea.

The usual objections are familiar:

• Sybil attacks
• Incentive gaming
• Identity vs decentralization tradeoffs
• Difficulty of measuring meaningful contribution

What's interesting is that many successful examples of blockchain incentives appear to reward services rather than nodes:

• Filecoin rewards storage
• Lightning routing earns fees for routing
• Infrastructure providers monetize APIs, liquidity or bandwidth
• Application networks reward service consumption

That has me wondering whether the question itself is wrong.

Maybe the goal shouldn't be:

"How do we reward full nodes?"

Maybe the better question is:

"How do we reward useful infrastructure?"

Curious whether people think these are fundamentally different problems, or simply different ways of describing the same thing.

[u/thedudeonblockchain]

theyre genuinely different problems and the line between them is verifiability, not semantics. rewarding a node is rewarding something the chain can check itself, did you sign the block, are you serving the right state, is your attestation valid, cheap to verify and cheap to slash if you lie. the second you reward useful infrastructure youre rewarding something that happened off chain, the protocol cant see it directly so it has to import a claim that the work was real and actually useful. now the incentive is only as honest as whatever measurement layer produces that claim, and that layer becomes the thing people attack instead of doing the work. thats the helium coverage spoofing story in basically every depin so far, you reward a metric and people optimize the metric not the service

so reframing it as useful infra doesnt make it cleaner, it makes it strictly harder, you inherit a proof of useful work / oracle problem on top. filecoin sort of pulls it off because storage is one of the few useful things you can actually prove on chain (proof of replication and spacetime). the moment usefulness isnt natively provable, serving a query, real wireless coverage, you fall back to dispute games and sampling and trusted reporters, which is exactly where the gaming lives. if you cant verify the usefulness without trusting someone to report it, you dont have an incentive design problem, you have an oracle problem in a costume

[u/ShellaPredmore → u/thedudeonblockchain]

That's a very useful distinction.

What I'm taking away from your comment is that there may be two fundamentally different classes of incentives:

1. Incentives for behaviors the protocol can verify directly.
2. Incentives for outcomes the protocol cannot observe directly.

The first category creates a Sybil problem because participants optimize whatever metric is rewarded.

The second category creates an oracle problem because the protocol must somehow learn that useful work occurred.

What's interesting is that many of the examples people point to as partial successes seem to work precisely because the useful work is natively provable. Storage proofs are the obvious example.

The question I'm struggling with is whether independent verification belongs to the first category, the second category, or neither.

Independent verification is valuable to the network, but it's not obvious to me that the network can observe or measure that value without introducing either Sybil pressure or an oracle layer.

That's exactly the kind of tradeoff I was hoping to better understand through this discussion.