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It’s unfair to equate this paper to obviously flawed ones since all their claims seem to be properly substantiated. Also, the protocol does not assume a trusted leader (otherwise a…

I disagree with this uncharitable view of the paper. First, an important missing point is that the protocol does not require trusted setup. In contrast, most prior works require th…

The (freely available) book "SAT/SMT by Example" [1] shows how a lot of different problems can be tackled with an SMT solver. I highly recommend it! [1] https://sat-smt.codes/

As written below, "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" by Katz & Lindell. Another option would be "A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography" by Boneh & Shoup. However, for starti…

For a rigorous, yet accessible and rather in-depth introduction to modern, provable cryptography I would recommend "Introduction to Modern Cryptography" by Katz & Lindell. It start…

ZKP inherit this definition from the complexity class of interactive proofs (IP) that is usually defined this way. As pointed out in a comment below, IP = PSPACE. Interestingly eno…

It seems to work for me. Though here is a snapshot just in case https://archive.md/MpPRL

I like the Ali Baba's cave [1] explanation for ZKP. Especially since it gives intuition for how one can prove that a protocol is in fact zero-knowledge. [1] http://pages.cs.wisc.ed…

Yes, in the strict sense of the meaning. In general, the comparison of VDFs (a cryptographic building block) and Bitcoin-style PoW (a consensus mechanism) is not that useful. Howev…

If you go by the usual, energy-wasting meaning of "proof of work" that is also the one relevant to the discussion (i.e., Bitcoin-style PoW which is described in the article), then …

No, a VDF just proves that, given a certain input, you spent a certain amount of time to compute the unique (!) VDF output. As said, this computation must be carried out sequential…

As far as I am aware, these long-range forks can be hindered by using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) [1, p. 6]. Essentially, VDFs take a certain amount of steps to compute and c…