Let me have another go, because I really love this question. Essentially it's like a SETI@home project - without going into details, let's just consider the theoretical model that some signals arrive from a source that is sufficiently random and then we have to do some computation on it to get some data. (If you prefer groundhogs to E.T., the weather forecast also has this property.) Then whoever computes the data first, will get a coin.
The main issue I see with similar models is that they don't satisfy property 1 (verifiability). But I argue that this is not so important. Let's suppose that anyone can submit data without any proof. Later,thought this data cancould be challenged by otherssolved through some court, if they think it's incorrect. There are several possibilities howbut as pointed out by Joseph in the comments to dothe first version of this answer, itthis would be similarlead to some court systemproblems. So instead, where you have to pay coins to appeal etcwe should pick a problem that can be verified. Unfortunately, I don't know much about what SETI was doing with the data, but probably there was something that they were looking for (Nowand now I don't mean aliens, but some signals). So we could say that every 10 minutes there's a data that comes from space, the first person to find a signal wins a coin, but the details of this worth discussingdata might contain no signal, in detailwhich case nobody is rewarded - I don't see an issue with this happening sometimes.)