[zapps-wg] Random Beacon Announcement

[Peter Todd]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 03:54:42PM -0600, Sean Bowe via zapps-wg wrote:
> Attached is the (signed) announcement of the random beacon.
> 
> Also, it's been timestamped using OpenTimestamps.

It's important to note that the OTS proof added little, if any, security to
this random beacon, for the simple reason that creating multiple variations of
it is nearly costless.

A much more compelling proof would have been to burn some amount of BTC in an
OP_RETURN output announcing the block that will be chosen. That's independently
verifiable after the fact as expensive to do multiple times, and also acts as a
timestamp.

Though given the low number of possible blocks to use as a seed - and the
apparent resistance of the use-case to partial influence - this may all be
academic anyway.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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