Sure, I understand all this. I don’t know how to enforce this magical “best behavior” though. At the very least I don’t know how to enforce it without serious side effects.
I would like to give you an idea what we are already planning: With Alpenglow we ship a new way to collect metrics. As part of this, all validators will tell us how quickly all validators vote (everybody reports on everybody once per epoch). This data could serve as a basis for a “much more accurate TVC”. We could simply take the median (to make it simple) report and directly pay according to that. This is not only what you want (silly TVC), but so much better than what you want. It’s like TVC on steroids.
However, this “better TVC” solution has obvious issues:
- You can earn more by not telling the truth.
- You can improve by moving to a geographically more central location.
Problem 2 we cannot really solve with this approach, it’s inherent with anything TVC. It’s even a tradeoff: The better you make TVC, the more of a centralization problem you have.
Problem 1 we can also not solve, at least not without what we would call “crypto delirium” (i.e., 100x overhead just to do the accounting in a more secure way, and it’s still 99% insecure). Both 1 and 2 are serious problems. No TVC is better than “good TVC” that has serious side effects.
Look, I understand the sentiment: Why do these “stubborn researchers” not just do TVC?!? The truth is, we thought long and hard about these things, and at the beginning of this long thinking process TVC sounds like a reasonable (even obvious!) idea. But if you think it to the end, “no TVC” actually trumps “TVC” (mainly because of the two reasons above). I know that this is difficult to understand, and I could tell you much much more about this stuff.
I hope this helps you understand why we are not just stubborn. We actually thought about this a lot…
