Re: [Eligibility-discuss] On 3797 alternatives

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 2:43 PM Rob Sayre <[e-mail]> 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...".

No, in my opinion it does not. The title of the document starts with
"Publicly Verifiable ...". Perhaps I should change the name to
"Publicly Persuasive...". Would a member of the public believe drand
is as honest as a major government run lottery? I think not.

> 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...

And that section gives specific reasons why not.

> While I agree that entropy "sources exist", the debate here is guidance on picking a verifiable one.

I think it needs to be not just mechanically verifiable but also
persuasively random.

Thanks,
Donald
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 2386 Panoramic Circle, Apopka, FL 32703 USA
 [e-mail]

> 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