Making PoW more energy efficient using VDFs

[TierT]

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?

[livesexPimp]

 - the VDF is designed to take e.g. 5 minutes to solve

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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?

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?

[BlackHatCoiner]

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?

[odolvlobo]

- the VDF is designed to take e.g. 5 minutes to solve

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.