Ethereum (for example) can be used to pay if the contract is fulfilled (e.g an intense computation job.)
1. You need to be able to verify that the other party is honest
2. When the data is intensive, you need to make sure that the computation is opaque to the computer. This is still an active research area, I believe. One of the keywords I associate with it is homomorphic encryption. Alternatively, consensus or verification can be done, with other zero-knowledge proofs or something similar perhaps.