Nostr can act as a marketplace for data processing, where users request jobs to be processed in certain ways (e.g. "speech-to-text", "summarization", etc.), but where they don't necessarily care about "who" processes the data.
This NIP is not to be confused with a 1:1 marketplace; but rather, a flow where user announces a desired output, willigness to pay, and service providers compete to fulfill the job requirement in the best way possible.
### Actors
There are two actors to the workflow described in this NIP:
Specifies the input data that the job is to be executed against. The input is relay-indexable so that clients interested in the exact same job can find the input data and the result result (if it's already fulfilled).
*`<marker>`: an optional field indicating where the data can be found if it is a subset of the provided values, for example the name of the key(s) in a key/value set, or the start and end positions of the data if it's a bytestream.
If a Customer has a preference for specific Service Provider(s) to process this job, they SHOULD indicate this by including the Service Provider(s) pubkey in a `p` tag. This is NOT intended to exclude other Service Providers and they MAY still choose to compete for jobs that have not tagged them.
A Customer MAY indicate that they will not pay for results produced after a specific Block height or Unix Timestamp. This is intended for time-sensitive jobs where the result is not relevant unless produced within a certain timeframe, e.g. a live transcription service.
The result of the job SHOULD be included in the `content` field. If the output is not text, the `content` field SHOULD be empty and an `output` tag should be used instead as described below.
The Service Provider MAY indicate errors during processing by including them in the `status` tag, these errors are intended to be consumed by the Customer.
The amount (in millisats) that the Service Provider is requesting to be paid. This amount MAY differ to the amount specified by the Customer in the `bid` tag. The amount SHOULD be less than the maximum amount specified by the user in the `bid` tag.
This NIP defines some example job types, Customers SHOULD specify these types for maximum compatibility with Service Providers. Other job types MAY be added to this NIP after being observed in the wild.
* When a job comes in, the Service Providers who opt to attempt to fulfill the request begin processing it, or they can react to it with feedback for the user (e.g. _payment required_, _unprocessable entity_, etc.)
A Customer MAY request multiple jobs to be processed in a chained form, so that the output of a job can be the input of the next job. (e.g. summarization of a podcast's transcription). This is done by specifying as `input` an eventID of a different job with the `job` marker.
Service Providers MAY begin processing a subsequent job the moment they see the prior job's result, but they will likely wait for a zap to be published first. This introduces a risk that Service Provider of job #1 might delay publishing the zap event in order to have an advantage. This risk is up to Service Providers to mitigate or to decide whether the service provider of job #1 tends to have good-enough results so as to not wait for a explicit zap to assume the job was accepted.
Service providers are at obvious risk of having their results not compensated. Mitigation of this risk is up to service providers to figure out (i.e. building reputation systems, requiring npub "balances", etc, etc).
It's out of scope (and undesirable) to have this NIP address this issue; the market should.
## Notes
### Multitple job acceptance
* Nothing prevents a user from accepting multiple job results.
### `kind:68001`: Job request #3 (summarize both podcasts into one podcast)
```json
{
"id": "125",
"tags": [
[ "j", "summarize" ],
[ "param", "length", "1 paragraph" ],
[ "i", "123", "job" ],
[ "i", "124", "job" ],
[ "bid", "100", "500" ]
]
}
```
# Notes
* Should there be a possibility of getting the job result delivered encrypted? I don't like it but maybe it should be supported.
* Ambiguity on job acceptance, particularly for job-chaining circumstances is deliberately ambiguous: service providers could wait until explicit job result acceptance / payment to start working on the next item on the chain, or they could start working as soon as they see a result of the previous job computed.
That's up to each service provider to choose how to behave depending on the circumstances. This gives a higher level of flexibility to service providers (which sophisticated service providers would take anyway).
