Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on October 14, 2022, 01:35:48 PM

Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on October 13, 2022, 11:50:02 PM

why does it matter which way you do it, treating it as a string vs a number though?

SHA256 takes bytes as input. Each character from a dice rolls string takes 8 bits, whereas in a dice rolled number (integer with base 6), each character takes about 1.66 bits on average (1, 2, 3, 4 give 2 bits, while 5, 6 give 1 bit). Therefore, hashing a string would give you a false sense of security. For example, string "123456" is 6 bytes, but (123456)₆ is 6*1.66 = ~9.96 bits. which is about 1 byte.

i don't know if i follow the logic about the "false sense of security" thing. in typical applications like say converting a bitcoin hex private key into a wif format, you are dealing with a 32 digit long hex number. like this one: 8147786C4D15106333BF278D71DADAF1079EF2D2440A4DDE37D747DED5403592

now the point is that you treat it however you want to but just because you assign more bits to each character doesn't mean it has more security. there are only the same number of such 32-length objects no matter what naming convention you use thus it doesn't matter how you represent them with regards to how many bytes they use for storage purposes.

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To think it more simply, in a string, each character takes up to 2^8 = 256 different values (00000000, 00000001 [...], 11111110, 11111111), but a dice roll can only give up to 6 different values. Therefore, a 128-bit random number doesn't have the same security as a 128-bit string that is consisted of 16 dice rolled characters.

that's irrelevant though.

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o

Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I still wouldn't recommend using dice rolls to generate a seed phrase. Even ignoring everything we have discussed above about randomness extraction and hash functions, dice are more likely to be biased than coins, are more likely to be thrown in a non-random way, it would be harder and take longer to detect that bias, and the statistical methods and tests required are more complicated. To test your dice are actually fair before using them would take longer than just using coin flips in the first place, and there are many more ways you could mess up your dice rolls than a simple heads = 0 and tails = 1 with a coin.

I think it is pointless to try and use a randomness extractor from any type of process like dice rolls or coin tosses. You're not going to improve the randomness by doing that. I think it's harder to model the physics of a dice roll than a coin toss though. It's much more complicated thus harder to predict the outcome. I'm not sure how biased an average die is and if that really has any significant affect that can be exploited on a very small sample size because no one is going to use a single die to generate more than a few bitcoin addresses most likely. Not all coins are fair either. How do you test that?