Bitcoin Forum

The plan is the following:
 - Add a field to blocks that has to be the result of a Verifiable Delay Function
 - the starting conditions of the VDF are based on the previous block
 - the VDF is designed to take e.g. 5 minutes to solve

Meaning a miner would need to wait for 5 minutes of sequential calculations before being able to put all the parallel computation power to work.
So for a block time of 10 minutes, there would be 5 minutes of low-energy-demand VDF calculation and 5 minutes of high-energy-demand parallel hashing (current PoW).
That would cut the total energy consumption roughly in half, and this could be scaled up to 9 minutes of VDF calculations or more, to reduce the energy footprint even further.

Is this viable?

But you cant force every miner to take the same amount of time to solve the vdf. Some will solve it faster than others because they have a more powerful computer so it just makes things more centralized.

1. You are trying to address a non-problem (the "bitcoin uses too much energy" drama is based on a lie)
2. Since you cannot force the miner do this or that, imho this cannot work. I mean, let's say they gracefully ignore your flag; what will you do then, sue them?

First of all, describe the function. Later, answer the following:

• Why should we have two mechanisms? Why shouldn't we remove mining and replace it with your function instead?
• What's the incentive of those who protect the network? At the moment, the more the computational power, the more the income. What's the former in your mechanism?
• How will you produce consensus if you don't use Proof-of-Work?

A VDF can provide a provable delay, but it cannot control the length of the delay without requiring standardized hardware

Also, PoW is a VDF, but the proof is stochastic and not mathematical.