For the PoW, 1 proof is generated on the send and 1 proof is generated on the receive, this is why people will see CPU activity when receiving from the faucet, the faucet itself also generating its own work. Other than that there is no PoW in the network, only when transactions are being added and the work is only applied to those doing the transactions.
Taking the example of RFCs and how they're maintained, how do you see their incentive structure being similar or different than something like this? From my perspective, groups maintain the TCP standard without TCP giving direct in-protocol incentives for its use, people build on top of it which is where their incentives lie.
I thought 'representative nodes' were ones that were doing this send and receive PoW for other users? Your comment made me think that this was already happening.
I understand that you don't want financial rewards within the protocol for running nodes and I'm not trying to get you to go against that. I was thinking of encouraging people through facilitating it or through promoting the idea of it rather than actual bribery. I'm not sure I would want to set one up right now, but I would be curious what's involved in having a representative node rather than regular wallet (unless I've miss-remembered what they actually are) and perhaps at some point before too long there may be other people curious enough to want to give it a try.
Ahh I see, the representatives do very little different than a plain wallet, since they're supposed to be long term things it's probably best to run a command line version on a server rather than a GUI on your desktop but I run them on cheap 3$/mo VPSs with no issue.
Setting one up involves running a node that just has a modest amount of disk space and network bandwidth, CPU usage is almost non existent. You can then pick an account and tell people, "this is my representative account, set me as your representative" and they can do that under Settings -> Change representative. When they do that it'll take the representation away from their old rep and give it to you and your vote strength would increase by the amount of their balance.
What your node will be doing is watching the network for transactions and signing them. This lets the nodes in the network know quorum to make sure they haven't been disconnected. The representative also watches the network for forks and if it sees them, it participates in the vote to pick which block survives. Forks are also an almost non existent thing since they're only created by people who changed the code to create them.