There are times when the crypto community seems to obsess about stuff that is not obviously justified. Here is one example I am thinking about that @alinush407 and @SashaSpiegelman may have a different take about. Randomness is a big thing and there are quite a few proposals for how to generate vrf. This is often taken to involve MPC and there is one version of this in which you use a two step protocol but you need to guarantee that there is a built in delay or vdf (@aeyakovenko proof of history is not a vdf btw) to make sure it is a 1 out of N security guarantee that the output will be random. Then there is a search for time-lock puzzles which need to be solved sequentially but are indeed hardware dependent and so on. All very interesting stuff don't get me wrong.

However, we already know of a vdf with an actual time attached to it. The network delay time is based on the speed of light and there is absolutely no way to circumvent the lower bound. Contrary to the nonsense stuff that gets put out, entanglement can never be used to defeat this bound.

So why is this not a vdf?