A Compute Center Anyone Can Join: A Peer-to-Peer System for AI Inference
Today, most people obtain AI inference by buying it from a small number of organizations that run large data centers, while many GPUs owned by individuals and small institutions sit idle for much of the day. Bitcoin showed that strangers can contribute resources under shared rules and receive checkable rewards, but it relies on an asymmetry: proof-of-work is expensive to produce and cheap to verify. Useful inference has no such asymmetry. We propose the Open Inference Market (OIM), which replaces the missing asymmetry with an economic mechanism. A worker delivers a result without knowing whether it will be audited; its unsettled earnings serve as collateral during a challenge window; and confirmed cheating forfeits all of it. We call this principle earnings as collateral. In a simplified model we show three things. The number of audits needed for deterrence is a constant per worker per day, independent of the worker's throughput, so the audited share falls as the network gets busier. A new worker can join with a short period of intensive auditing and a very small bond. And whether the mechanism works at all depends only on the ratio of the audit judge's false-flag rate to its detection rate. Under example parameters, about 0.3 replays per worker per day are enough to make cheating unprofitable for a rational worker. On this basis we lay out a path that hands four powers back to participants one at a time: owning compute, writing history, judging work, and releasing value. A compute center need not be a building; it can be a protocol that anyone can join.