But the cryptocurrency integration looks tacked on, or orthogonal to the problem -- which will hamper the adoption, or even turn away application makers otherwise interested.
Hence, the cryptocurrency part is purposely orthogonal to Codius. I don’t think it’s tacked on, it’s more agnostic and it’s up to end users to decide what if any blockchain integrations they want. The potential for Codius (and yes, it is an ambitious vision, with a long way to go) is a framework where you could deploy much more functional and powerful distributed applications than would ever be possible with a blockchain based approach like etherium.
The node can always lie by perfectly adhering to the protocol but doing something completely different behind the scenes. You can hash, sign or encrypt the code as much as you like but that has nothing to do with verifying that the hardware is actually running that code.
Maybe with homomorphic encryption this will be possible but AFAIK this technology is not even close to ready for such use cases.
So in Bitcoin for example, Bitmain has 41% of the hashing power and a bunch of pools have 10% but you just assume they won't work together to defraud you. And turns out, you're pretty much right, that's never happened.
Codius just improves on that security model by letting you choose however many hosts you want by whatever criteria you want.