{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] wrote","author_name":"ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] (npub1g5…3ms3l)","author_url":"https://yabu.me/npub1g5zswf6y48f7fy90jf3tlcuwdmjn8znhzaa4vkmtxaeskca8hpss23ms3l","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://yabu.me","html":"📅 Original date posted:2021-05-18\n📝 Original message:Good morning Erik,\n\n\u003e Verifiable Delay Functions involve active participation of a single\n\u003e verifier. Without this a VDF decays into a proof-of-work (multiple\n\u003e verifiers === parallelism).\n\u003e\n\u003e The verifier, in this case is \"the bitcoin network\" taken as a whole.\n\u003e I think it is reasonable to consider that some difficult-to-game\n\u003e property of the last N blocks (like the hash of the last 100\n\u003e block-id's or whatever), could be the verification input.\n\u003e\n\u003e The VDF gets calculated by every eligible proof-of-burn miner, and\n\u003e then this is used to prevent a timing issue.\n\u003e\n\u003e Seems reasonable to me, but I haven't looked too far into the\n\u003e requirements of VDF's\n\u003e\n\u003e nice summary for anyone who is interested:\n\u003e https://medium.com/@djrtwo/vdfs-are-not-proof-of-work-91ba3bec2bf4\n\u003e\n\u003e While VDF's almost always lead to a \"cpu-speed monopoly\", this would\n\u003e only be helpful for block latency in a proof-of-burn chain. Block\n\u003e height would be calculated by eligible-miner-burned-coins, so the\n\u003e monopoly could be easily avoided.\n\nInteresting link.\n\nHowever, I would like to point out that the *real* reason that PoW consumes lots of power is ***NOT***:\n\n* Proof-of-work is parallelizable, so it allows miners consume more energy (by buying more grinders) in order to get more blocks than their competitors.\n\nThe *real* reason is:\n\n* Proof-of-work allows miners to consume more energy in order to get more blocks than their competitors.\n\nVDFs attempt to sidestep that by removing parallelism.\nHowever, there are ways to increase *sequential* speed, such as:\n\n* Overclocking.\n  * This shortens lifetime, so you can spend more energy (on building new miners) in order to get more blocks than your competitors.\n* Lower temperatures.\n  * This requires refrigeration/cooling, so you can spend more energy (on the refrigeration process) in order to get more blocks than your competitors.\n\nI am certain people with gaming rigs can point out more ways to improve sequential speed, as necessary to get more frames per second.\n\nGiven the above, I think VDFs will still fail at their intended task.\nSpeed, yo.\n\nThus, VDFs do not serve as a sufficient deterrent away from ever-increasing energy consumption --- it just moves the energy consumption increase away from the obvious (parallelism) to the obscure-if-you-have-no-gamer-buds.\n\nYou humans just need to get up to Kardashev 1.0, stat.\n\nRegards,\nZmnSCPxj"}