Not sure why it would be an abomination. This is the exact use case which is a fit for cryptocurrency networks.
Unless there can be a way to trivially verify what others tell you, crypto currencies are a dead end
You always need a way to hold nodes accountable in a system like this, or it'll be rife with manipulation — because there's already a strong, innate incentive to manipulate results. Today, we call that industry "SEO".
Building a societal system where you know you can rely on your peers, you build together, is a more joyful, more resilient, more ecological and also more realistic way of building a thriving society than distrust-by-default that cryptocurrencies live for.
I also don't understand your point. The current world is not what I want, so let's make it worse according to my values ?
That sort of thing only gets handled very indirectly and much later and after a bad actor does their bad thing enough times for the surrounding greater population of good actors to notice a pattern.
Bad actors exist and there must be some process for identifying and dealing with them, but they are not the majority of people and so probably don't have to be the first, last, primary, and only consideration at all times.
IE living in a bomb shelter is not a life worth living, even though yes you will be safe from bombs and theives.
I highly dislike monetary incentives because they perpetuate inequalities by design, so here's another incentive: if you store a correct index, I will keep working with you and we can build an awesome system together. We can coordinate by talking to each other rather than trying to get money from each other.
You are paying either
- Block space: your transaction to be included in a block
- State: modifying the world state (EVM in Ethereum)
Trust problem is solved by various other means, usually on libp2p level, by banning node (IP addresses) that send you bad data, which you can verify by comparing it to data from other peers.
Spam is not a function of rate but of content. Spam can absolutely be sent in a blockchain, as you say, and making the price higher only makes both spam and non-spam more difficult. Spam for me might be actual legit information for you.
Hashcash is another beast, it only has the proof-of-work part, not the money part (contrary to its name) so it's not comparable.
The concept of a ZK VM is that it is able to prove arbitrary code. Risc0 and the more recent SP1[1] both compile arbitrary Rust programs into ZK circuits for generating and verifying execution proofs.