Bacalhau is a distributed network of compute providers running jobs on behalf of clients.
It is our intention to support a crypto based token that will facilitate the payment for jobs. Clients that submit jobs will pay an amount into escrow (using “bac-coin” for some other such token) - Compute providers that run the jobs will then be paid this token once the validation of the job has completed.
This is an essential component for a successful Bacalhau network - otherwise - why would compute providers ever run a job? Perhaps there would be some that do it for the sheer hell of it - or because they want to help the network - but realistically, without some kind of financial incentive - the uptake of the network will be much slower than if we have one.
So this leads us to an interesting problem around the timing of a token. Planning and executing a token for bacalhau will not be a quick exercise and so during the “gap” we are currently in - how do we incentivise compute providers to run jobs?
The premise of this document is to use FIL+ as an incentive mechanism for compute providers to run jobs. As it’s the compute provider that will have the results of a job on their disks - they are best placed to act as the storage miner for the results of a job. By allocating Datacap to storage deals that compute providers produce from the results of a compute job - they will have a tangible reward for running that job.
Filecoin Plus is based on a set of guiding principles, detailed in FIP-0003, that focus the program on increasing Filecoin’s effectiveness at becoming the decentralized storage network for humanity’s most important information.
Root key-holders, notaries, clients, and storage providers, interact through the allocation and spending of DataCap. Notaries retrieve DataCap in batches and then allocate it to trustworthy clients that spend the DataCap to fund storage deals. You can read more about FIL+ here…
FIL+ notaries serve as fiduciaries for the Filecoin Network and are responsible for allocating DataCap to clients with valuable storage use cases. You can see the stats on the current allocation of Datacap using the https://filplus.info/ dashboard. As of Dec 2022 there are > 500 Petabytes of Datacap allocated to clients by notaries.
Bacalhau is a compute network where jobs consume storage and produce storage (in the form of results). This opens up an interesting question:
If a Bacalhau job has an input that is a “verified” FIL+ CID - does the output of that job (i.e. the derivative dataset) also deserve to be awarded Datacap?
Let’s take an example - the human genome lives on Filecoin as part of a verified, FIL+ deal (i.e. the deal consumed datacap that was awarded to the client that created the deal). A job is then submitted to the Bacalhau network that consumes this dataset; does some useful transformation and then outputs a derivative dataset.
In the above example - it’s quite easy to see that the derivative results of the job would also deserve to be awarded Datacap.
The Datacap would be awarded to the compute provider that ran the job because the results of that job are sat on their disks and so it makes sense that the compute provider is also the storage miner for those results.