Re: [Eligibility-discuss] On 3797 alternatives

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

If we want to go full geek on this subject, we could also incorporate a 
commitment scheme in the process. For example, before the list is 
announced, the nomcom chair could list a set of committed random seeds, 
and publish their hashes. When reshuffling is needed, the nomcom chair 
uses the next committed seed, publishes it, and publishes the 
corresponding reordering. Or something like that. It would have the 
advantage of being both verifiable and instantaneous.

-- Christian Huitema

On 5/31/2023 11:43 AM, Rob Sayre wrote:
> I'm not really here to sell drand, but it does meet the requirements on
> paper: "the source is announced before the ceremony starts...".
> 
> Presumably you'd pick a drand iteration number from the future, and use
> that. The draft is a little confusing in using stock tickers, because
> "Section 3.1: Sources of Randomness" of RFC3797* says not to do that...
> 
> While I agree that entropy "sources exist", the debate here is guidance on
> picking a verifiable one.
> 
> thanks,
> Rob
> 
> * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3797#section-3.1
> 
> On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 11:13 AM Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> Though Donald is concerned about obtaining adequate entropy for this
>> purpose, I am not. As you say, sources exist.  (Indeed, this could be an
>> application of various distributed consensus systems, though some of us
>> might be loathe to use them for even this purpose.)
>>
>> On Wed, May 31, 2023, at 14:09, Rob Sayre wrote:
>>> Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>> That's flaw 1 in Paul's draft: insufficient entropy.
>>>> Flaw 1b is that D is described as a number, but a
>>>> byte sequence is better and what it really is anyway.
>>>
>>> This sounds like a use case drand / "The League of Entropy" is supposed
>>> to help with, but I've never used it, and can't speak to its quality
>>> (although it certainly seems solid).
>>>
>>> https://drand.love
>>>
>>> Here's what it outputs:
>>>
>>> Latest Randomness
>>> ----
>>> Here's the latest random value that was generated, round #3004181:
>>> de9a71d9ece82657fe7e77ce45889466d4a73ca9b7bf95ab8748dd47711fe980
>>> The next randomness is expected in 2 seconds.
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>> Rob
>>
> 
>