On Mon, Feb 13, 2023 at 4:07 AM juan via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > Edward Murphy via agora-discussion [2023-02-12 21:47]: > > Proto-Proposal: Schrodinger's Dice > > (co-author = ais523) > > Not to dismiss this, but I have long wondered about the applicability of > verifiable random numbers in Agora. What do you all think about this? > > > https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3797__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!gLYnFipmMZ4zIHmSPTdnBzt9voUo5Yjb9A5fVhSCzqSW8G2iTQ7jAg3OfqGZSPjKdnYesajWKJvBaJlVT4-_ro1KyNY$
This is a debate that has come up from time to time in Agora. When it comes up, there's been a split between "we should use a service that allows full public verification" and "if we're not playing a game where we can trust enough to roll a physical die and report the result, I don't want to play" (I'm mostly in the latter camp personally). The current compromise rule is the current SHOULD - prior to several Officers using Discord rolling as a habit[*], we often rolled with a verifiable email dice service to satisfy that SHOULD. We've also done some more creative things (examples: for 0-99, announce ahead that one will use the last 2 digits of tomorrow's closing Dow Jones average, which looking at years of data passes various tests of randomness[**] and the method is actually suggested in the RFC you linked. Another creative way was explicitly directly using a radioactive source so the randomness was random in a full quantum sense). That creativity is kind of cool when it comes up IMO, which is another reason not to formalize on a particular service. [*] not truly verifiable, though some of us have been treating it that way, and it's usable by anyone fast enough to email between observing the the selection on discord and the follow-up email though I don't think anyone has "cheated" that way. [**] this method highlights ais523's point - in that case, the random number could be known by everyone, be fully confirmable and sufficiently random, and still be responded to by everyone before the "roller" takes the action that depends on the number. -G.
