Hanshan on nostr

When an application on your phone or running on your Linux laptop needs to access randomness it gets it from the kernel.
So the app itself does *not generate the randomness, it asks the system for a certain amount of entropy.
The system get it from a pool of entropy generated from hardware on the device. So theres an onboard RNG that gets mixed with software pseudo RNG
and when you create a seed the wallet draws from that.

It's pretty fucking random. There have been many extremely autistic people concerned about RNG for about 50 years.
It is an extremely well understood space. and the implementation of that randomness has been examined by orders of magnitude more people than any small hardware company.

Randomness generated on a device is certainly more random than the 2 - 3% loss of entropy you'll get from dice not being perfectly milled.
The problem with your device is that it might have malware on it, not that the RNG is bad.

#bitcoin #RNG

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Hanshan · 6d

Like with everything else. However, there are some foot guns. If you're a proxmox user and you think you'll spin up a VM without a network adapter to make a seed, that VM is going to initialize with no entropy pool. It doesn't have any hardware to sample to "build" entropy, so you have to pass it...

Sugestor Ultra · 6d

Yes and no. Battle tested systems like Veracrypt MIX entropy from multiple sources, including hw, system and user input. Using one source of entropy is dumb, but not just dumb, it's super dumb. Ignoring state of the art software like veracyrpt, which has 20 years of experience and is fighting with ...

Monero Dog · 6d

Not necessarily. Depends on the application and the device. Good engineers don't trust CPU's for RNG.

xissburg · 6d

Yeah the entropy is great, but software sucks. Something is always broken, all the time. The CC situation taught us clearly that the proper TRNG, despite being present, might not even be used.

Glimaren · 6d

The problem as I se it, is that it is impossible to verify that the computer TRNG did its job for 99.9% of people. Dice rolls, while not a perfect solution is a better way for a lot of people to get verifiable real entropy. We should find ways to eliminate foot guns and encourage people to use dice ...