rich1.0ZmnSCPxj [ARCHIVE] (npub1g5…3ms3l)https://yabu.me/npub1g5zswf6y48f7fy90jf3tlcuwdmjn8znhzaa4vkmtxaeskca8hpss23ms3lnjumphttps://yabu.me📅 Original date posted:2021-05-18 📝 Original message:Good morning Erik, > Verifiable Delay Functions involve active participation of a single > verifier. Without this a VDF decays into a proof-of-work (multiple > verifiers === parallelism). > > The verifier, in this case is "the bitcoin network" taken as a whole. > I think it is reasonable to consider that some difficult-to-game > property of the last N blocks (like the hash of the last 100 > block-id's or whatever), could be the verification input. > > The VDF gets calculated by every eligible proof-of-burn miner, and > then this is used to prevent a timing issue. > > Seems reasonable to me, but I haven't looked too far into the > requirements of VDF's > > nice summary for anyone who is interested: > https://medium.com/@djrtwo/vdfs-are-not-proof-of-work-91ba3bec2bf4 > > While VDF's almost always lead to a "cpu-speed monopoly", this would > only be helpful for block latency in a proof-of-burn chain. Block > height would be calculated by eligible-miner-burned-coins, so the > monopoly could be easily avoided. Interesting link. However, I would like to point out that the *real* reason that PoW consumes lots of power is ***NOT***: * 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. The *real* reason is: * Proof-of-work allows miners to consume more energy in order to get more blocks than their competitors. VDFs attempt to sidestep that by removing parallelism. However, there are ways to increase *sequential* speed, such as: * Overclocking. * This shortens lifetime, so you can spend more energy (on building new miners) in order to get more blocks than your competitors. * Lower temperatures. * This requires refrigeration/cooling, so you can spend more energy (on the refrigeration process) in order to get more blocks than your competitors. I am certain people with gaming rigs can point out more ways to improve sequential speed, as necessary to get more frames per second. Given the above, I think VDFs will still fail at their intended task. Speed, yo. Thus, 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. You humans just need to get up to Kardashev 1.0, stat. Regards, ZmnSCPxj