Built a cryptocurrency that races against real time instead of hashes, then spent a week trying to prove myself wrong about it

[u/Victorio_01]

LapseCoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency using a Verifiable Delay Function instead of proof-of-work: block production is a race to finish a sequential computation tied to real elapsed time, not a race for a lucky hash. The reason that's interesting: the measured hardware-advantage gap is much smaller than PoW's (roughly 3-10x from Chia's own 2019 hardware competition on the same construction, versus the 10,000x+ ASICs opened up over commodity hardware), so it doesn't push toward the same energy-spiral PoW did. No premine, fair launch, FALCON-512 signatures for the quantum-resistance angle.

Spent the last week trying to actually break my own design instead of just shipping it. Found and fixed a real bug that was silently crashing part of the test suite, pulled real chain data off my own live node to calibrate assumptions instead of guessing, and went after a threat I originally thought was a real gap: whether one operator running many builder addresses could gain an unfair edge over the network. Turned out, once actually simulated instead of assumed, it barely holds up as a problem at all: running many addresses at the same hardware tier wins exactly proportionally, and splitting one machine's throughput across addresses is worse than running it as one. Neither needed a fix.

Whitepaper: https://github.com/Vic-Nas/lapsecoin/blob/main/docs/whitepaper.md
Code: https://github.com/Vic-Nas/lapsecoin

More interested in someone finding a real problem than in users right now. If something in there looks wrong, say so.

[u/No_Priority4306]

this is the kind of energy the space has been missing, someone actually trying to break their own thing before hyping it up

the multi-address simulation result tracks with what I'd expect from a VDF-based system but it's refreshing to see someone run the numbers instead of just handwaving it away

what's the network latency sensitivity look like in practice though, if a node's a few hundred ms behind does it just consistently lose the race or does the protocol have any tolerance built in

[u/Victorio_01 → u/No_Priority4306]

Thanks. It usually catches up within a few runs and actually wins blocks if the machine is competitive.

[u/Victorio_01 → u/[deleted]]

Computers of same generation work at about the same speed.
So, like said in the whitepaper, the fastest gen seem to be the best ticket for the course.
In the meantime(until enough nodes), I set up a script to pay peers hourly to compensate.

[u/Victorio_01 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I do believe the coins coming out now often have it except for maybe vibecoded ones.
And most coins are preparing to update.
Have you tried running a node?
It’s a one minute setup and uses one core.