On: Cicada: Private on-chain voting using time-lock puzzles

Time lock puzzle, is that a fancy way of saying proof of work?

They’re fundamentally different since the standard definition of a VDF is strictly non-parallelizable and P/o/W is generally designed to be “embarrassingly parallel.”

It may seem like a minor subtlety but the resulting dynamics are dramatically different. For a VDF it doesn’t matter if you have 1 machine churning away or 1000 machines churning away, it will take you the same amount of time to finish the calculation.

It’s like that but usually to decrypt something where the output of a verifiable delay function is a key.

are there other verifiable delay functions than essentially just proof of work opinionated about hardware capabilities?

It's a fancy way of saying magic beans.