My relatives back home opened a small supermarket and tried out facial recognition payments last year, claiming it was high-tech. After two months, they scrapped it. My relative looked pained: every transaction had to verify online, and when the internet lagged, customers were left waiting at the checkout, leading to long lines during peak hours. The elderly just couldn't handle it; the cost of the equipment and fees was way more than the labor they saved. He dropped a line: "The tech is good tech, but it’s too heavy, weighing down small businesses."
That line "too heavy" hit me when I read the
@OpenLedger whitepaper on page 10 about the inference fee formula.
One of the core selling points of the whitepaper is that everything is on-chain, traceable, and settled. Each time a model inference is called, it’s settled using
$OPEN tokens. Section 2.2.4 even breaks down the costs into model fees, staking fees, and data contribution fees, with precise accounting for each link. It sounds granular enough to be reassuring.
But my relative's "too heavy" keeps echoing in my mind. AI inference is all about speed and cost-efficiency—when you ask an AI a question, it should respond in a fraction of a second. But if every call needs to be logged on-chain, attributed, and split among a bunch of addresses, who’s going to bear the costs and delays of this on-chain overhead?
The whitepaper briefly mentions optimizing with Rollup, but it doesn’t specify how fast it can really get or whether a single call will cost a few cents or a few bucks. That’s awkward: AI applications are in a high-frequency scenario that’s extremely sensitive to latency and cost, unlike financial transactions, which can afford to be "a bit slower and more expensive."
$LAB #BTC I call this the "burden of on-chain settlement." Transparency and traceability sound great, but they come with weight; every entry adds to the inference load. If this burden makes each call slow and costly, then even the fairest accounting mechanism could end up being abandoned by developers who vote with their feet.
#OpenLedger Ultimately, can a system that records everything on-chain meet the real demands of AI inference which requires high-frequency, low-latency, and low-cost operations?