In the era of Web3, decentralized technologies have emerged as the cornerstone of a new digital paradigm. Backed by a decentralized blockchain architecture, the Web3 space aims to democratize all aspects of the web. From data-sharing to learning models, outsourcing computation is an established, prevalent practice. Verifiable computation makes this practice trustworthy as clients/users can now efficiently validate the integrity of a computation. As verifiable computation gets considered for applications in the Web3 space, decentralization is crucial for system reliability, ensuring that no single entity can suppress clients. At the same time, however, decentralization needs to be balanced with efficiency: clients want their computations done as quickly as possible. Motivated by these issues, we study the trade-off between decentralization and efficiency when outsourcing computational tasks to strategic, rational solution providers. Specifically, we examine this trade-off when the client employs (1) revelation mechanisms, i.e. auctions, where solution providers bid their desired reward for completing the task by a specific deadline and then the client selects which of them will do the task and how much they will be rewarded, and (2) simple, non-revelation mechanisms, where the client commits to the set of rules she will use to map solutions at specific times to rewards and then solution providers decide whether they want to do the task or not. We completely characterize the power and limitations of revelation and non-revelation mechanisms in our model.

翻译：在Web3时代，去中心化技术已成为新型数字范式的基石。依托去中心化的区块链架构，Web3领域致力于实现网络各层面的民主化。从数据共享到学习模型，计算外包已成为一种成熟且普遍的做法。可验证计算使这种实践变得可信，因为客户/用户现在能够高效验证计算的完整性。随着可验证计算在Web3领域的应用被提上日程，去中心化对系统可靠性至关重要，它能确保没有任何单一实体能够压制客户。然而与此同时，去中心化需要与效率取得平衡：客户希望其计算任务能尽可能快速完成。受这些问题驱动，我们研究了将计算任务外包给战略性理性解决方案提供商时，去中心化与效率之间的权衡关系。具体而言，我们考察了客户采用以下两种机制时的权衡：（1）揭示机制（即拍卖机制），解决方案提供商通过投标提出在特定截止时间前完成任务所期望的报酬，随后客户选择由谁执行任务及其报酬数额；（2）简单的非揭示机制，客户预先承诺将特定时间提交的解决方案映射为报酬的规则集，随后解决方案提供商自行决定是否执行任务。我们在模型中完整刻画了揭示机制与非揭示机制的能力边界与局限性。