5 ms·
> One of them will finish calculating VDF earlier how is that different from one miner finding a valid signature faster than the other? and how is that not pa
by keymone 5y ago
> One of them will finish calculating VDF earlier
how is that different from one miner finding a valid signature faster than the other?
and how is that not parallelization?
- phoyd 5y agoPoint is, that you can not finish VDF twice as fast (and probably not even by any other factor >1) with two CPUs, because they can't share work.
- keymone 5y agoThat is not an answer to my question. So far it’s just PoW. Where’s the difference?
- lupire 5y agoThere's nothing to parallelize. There is one computation that takes a long time. If two computers do the same work, only the faster one matters, not the luckier one. Bitcoin miners can parallelize because it's a search problem, so they can probe multiple different candidates simultaneously. That said, VDF isn't a drop in replacement for Bitcoin style POW. VDF just gives you the ability to say (provably, so no one can cheat) "everyone has to do a 10 minute serialized computation before launching a (parallelizable) POW hash search" so we don't use all the world's available electricity just for mining.
- keymone 5y agoIf there is PoW component then it’ll take just as much energy as Bitcoin does to provide the same security, because energy spent = mining reward. Except it’s going to be worse because VDF is the centralizing factor, it’s like having bitcoin where constructing a block takes really long time. The actor that finishes first has the advantage to start PoW and will win disproportionate amount of blocks by revealing their data at the last possible moment, preferably when or just before another actor publishes their “worse” PoW.