Incentives

Clients

Because providers have to mine first and there's the risk the client may not pay, providers have a good reason to be choosy with the Client Asks they start mining for.

This a new client with no past trades, and therefore with no reputation, may get fewer blinded offers. Such a client might also only get offers from providers who themselves have lower or no reputation.

A client with negative reputation will likely get worse results: no provider may want to mine for them, or maybe only at a higher price point.

For long-term use of the protocol, clients are better served by building good reputation.

Providers

The client has to first pay the provider's invoice, before the provider's work can be checked. This means the clients will likely first check the provider's reputation before deciding whether to accept their blinded solution or not.

The providers will therefore want to accumulate positive reputation, by posting valid blinded solutions on time.

The initial Client Ask indicates a timeframe within which the blinded solution is expected. Since mining is probabilistic, it's impossible for a provider to know if it's worth it to start mining or not. However, given the target difficulty and the provider's available hashrate, it's possible to determine with a certain confidence level if mining will likely find a result in that timeframe or not.

For example, a conservative provider might want to only start mining Client Asks that have a 75% chance of being mined within the Client's timeframe. Conversely, a more aggressive miner might be satisfied with a 50% or lower chance of successfully mining on time. This means the aggressive provider will start mining for more offers, but at the same time, if solutions are not found on time, that will have been wasted mining.

The providers are therefore incentivized to only mine when there is an acceptable chance of finding a solution on time.

The fact that clients will likely only choose one solution, which is probably the first one they receive, is also worth considering. This means providers with higher hashrate will likely post solutions sooner, and therefore get paid. This puts providers with a lower hashrate at a disadvantage. However, they can compensate with a higher reputation, lower prices, or only accepting Client Asks that have a much higher chance of being mined on time. They could also specialize on clients with no reputation, which will likely be ignored by providers with a higher available hashrate.

Relays

Since reputation is based on past trade events, this can be an opportunity for relays.

For example, a relay can offer long-term storage for trade events in exchange for a subscription fee. Providers who wish to build a long-term reputation and reliably prove it, will likely be interested to subscribe. The same holds for clients who wish to determine more accurate provider reputations.