Staking was introduced to reward actual market performance instead of performance on holdout data, and to prevent spam.
Cryptocurrency is the method of payment because it’s a global competition, and that’s the only way to pay everyone across countries. Originally rewards were in Bitcoin but switched to an ethereum token to facilitate staking.
https://numer.ai is an entire hedge fund built around an anonymous ML prediction tournament. They solicit predictions, trade them, and reward the best performing ones. IIRC They’ve paid millions in prizes over the last few years.
They also recently introduced Numerai Signals, where they pay for the performance of actual training data. So you can make money providing datasets that perform well.
If one day your head is in a different space and you don’t feel like working, you suck it up and work anyway because you’re a professional.
If you didn’t accomplish anything for the day, you put that in your end of day email/report and explain why, and what you need to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
If you’re actually sick or need a day off you notify your superior. They will work with the team to pause or reassign your work while you’re gone, and when you get back you resume your work.
I much prefer stand-downs (I’m claiming the name now).
At the end of the day, you tell your team what you accomplished for the day in an email. Everyone already knows what they’re working on next because that’s part of the ticketing and schedule system your company uses, and decided at the beginning of the release period. If you’re blocked you go tell the person whose blocking you, or your manager.
When everyone wakes up and goes to work they can just get to work.
If you want a cheaper alternative to the Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger, try MorningStar's "Meat Lovers" burger. IMO it's just as good, with 27g of protein and without as much saturated fat.