[byteware]

talking as someone who is building such a system, why would an avarage participant of the network give their own money, i dont think they would for the same reason i'm not running a bounty program with my dollars, the only use of having it on the blockchain is rewards without using your own money (so it's economics depends on the eventual value of the coin), for that it has to be bound to the minting process, but a purely algorithmic system for determining who gets how much based on their proofs seems elusive (think of the infinite possible proofs 1+2=3, 1+3=4...), we are going for having a central authority doing the minting for proofs (as voting based on money would hardly reflect mathematical experties)

[7373737373]

I'd like to personally put 5-10 bucks toward the solution of the Collatz conjecture, just for fun (and to see machine learning people grind their GPU-teeth on it).

No idea about the minting process, there seems to be an infinitude of possibilities.