Hey MrXOR! First off, thanks for posting this link to HN! Second, the VDF used here leverages RSA groups, while the Chia implementation uses Class groups. These two VDFs are compared here: https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/VDFsurvey.pdf. Both the VDFs are subject to hardware and algorithmic speedups which will not impact the security of their use as long as these are taken into account. If you are interested in learning more about VDFs I would recommend looking at this collaborative project by Ethereum and Filecoin: https://vdfresearch.org/.

Excuse me, Another question:

From [1]:

>> Cryptophage project solved it in 2 months.

What about ASICs (NSA's power and love!)? How long would it take? any estimation? 2 days? :-)

[1] https://www.cryptophage.com

We are currently investigating ASICs, but a rough estimation would be that they could be at least 10x faster, if not more (e.g. 6 days or less)