If there’s a reward for computing a VDF faster than everyone else, why won’t the amount of wasted resources, in the the form of e.g. human capital dedicated to computing faster VDFs, not be equivalent to the economic waste if the verification scheme used is proof of work? The article claims that proof of work is costing Ethereum hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but this VDF competition is also wasting millions of dollars in human capital to compute a fast VDF before there’s even a running blockchain using it (ie before there’s even a real non-synthetic incentive to break the system). Given that we need millions of dollars of waste just to launch the system safely, why wouldn’t we expect the wasted human capital dedicated to computing faster vdfs to increase to hundreds of millions once an actual attackable system is out in the wild, same as proof of work.

Moreover, it seems very unclear that wasting human capital is less economically bad than wasting the same “valu” in raw energy, particularly if a lot of that energy is from renewable sources anyway.