[TASK] Handling payment flows for all types of use cases

[drewstone]

Objective

Establish clear mechanisms for defining, pricing, and distributing payments for service requests, ensuring flexibility while maintaining a structured economic model.

Checklist

• Determine whether users should be allowed to define their own price targets.
• Decide if price targets can be set to zero and how that impacts the system.
• Establish rules for requesting services with no payment and define expected behaviors.
• Define acceptable payment structures (e.g., fixed schedules vs. compute-based pricing).
• Explore pricing algorithms for setting service costs dynamically.
• Analyze different market mechanisms (e.g., auctions, order books, off-chain agreements).
• Clarify how payments are distributed to operators and whether they should be streamed.
• Determine how service continuation is tied to ongoing payments and how non-payment impacts operations.
• Identify and document edge cases related to market mechanisms and payment flows.
• Develop test cases to validate various pricing and payment scenarios.

Raw

Right now, like the price targets, in my opinion is maybe it's sufficient, maybe it's not. I don't know if we wanna allow people to define something of their own here. There was a edge case when I was testing of allowing of whether we should allow price targets that are completely zero. There's edge cases of whether we should allow a user to request the service with no payment. There's questions of whether we should allow users to just offer a payment like they select their operators and they say I'm gonna pay you all at this schedule I'm gonna pay you ten dollars a month right there's no question of what I'm paying for on the compute side or there's questions around like okay if we do set price targets we have to price that according to some algorithm like how much should this actually cost? I think this is the next stage after we get through this slashing logic is ultimately like what are the market mechanisms for dealing with requesting services. Because we could you know simply say that you know operators they accept service and the expectation is the user or the customer or someone is paying them someone is rewarding them with a token or something else and they're just running the service because if you look at eigen layer or you look at symbiotic they just have this sort of off-chain or out of band agreement that they're gonna get paid and payments happen so I know we have this cloud infrastructure so I think we need to reconsider all these different types of flows there's gonna be a lot of different market mechanisms that will want to use maybe auctions maybe order books. And I think right now it's not clear to me another thing that's not clear to me is let's say we have what we currently have which is you pay for the service how often are these payments actually distributed to the operators running the service right? In theory they should be streamed in some way and maybe if they stop then the operators can also stop providing the service there's a lot of like edge cases like that that I'm not sure how we want to handle but yeah.