Proof of Response

We present a mechanism that for a network of participants allows one participant of the network (Alice) to request some data from another participant (Bob) and either receive a response from Bob within a knownin-advance, bounded time b, or receive a proof that at least one edge on the way to Bob was broken within b, or receive a streaming payment proportional to time passed beyond b during which neither was received. This mechanism allows for building downstream applications that require provable responses from other participants, such as decentralized storage solutions, decentralized AI agents, and more. It is now inevitable that, in the future, the majority of tasks will be performed by a massive decentralized network of interconnected agents powered by large language models. As the complexity of the tasks performed by agents increases, so will the average number of dependencies of the agents on other agents. As an example from an adjacent field, Python, NPM, and Rust packages can have dependencies on other packages, and installing a single package, such as a package to compute SHA-256 hashes, often results in the installation of dozens of other packages that it depends on.