Post
Topic
Board Project Development
Re: Are dices for generating seed words fair?
by
larry_vw_1955
on 17/10/2022, 04:24:04 UTC
that's a bit unrealistic to force someone to roll a dice around 600 times just to generate a single bitcoin private key.
Exactly. Which is part of the reason I am arguing against using dice. If you instead want to test whether a single die has no bias and be reasonably confident in your conclusions, then it would require even more rolls than the ~16,000 coin flips I gave above to test for a coin. Why take the risk, when there are safer, simpler, and quicker methods available?
i mean you outlined one safer method which is flipping the coin twice and eliminating rolls where you had a duplicate. i guess that's "safer simpler and quicker" than rolling a dice with unknown bias. not sure what other methods you had in mind though. i'm not yet convinced that other factors don't play a greater role in flipping a coin though like the way the coin is flipped. without any control over that process, someone could maybe affect the outcome slightly (introduce a bias).


Quote from:  BlackHatCoiner

I'm still having a hard time comprehending your point. That if I give you a number you can't know if it has a certain bias?
yeah that's what i thought but when i think about it again, i realize if it lands on one number too often then the number on the opposite side is less often so there's 2 clues it might be generated using a biased dice. but i don't know if that is exploitable.

Quote
First of all, it's not for a single private key; it can work as a seed, which can be later used to derive nearly infinite private keys.
i guess. wasn't aware of exactly what steps were involved in that but that would be better so you don't have to spend hours every so often rolling dice.

Quote
While paranoid, I still prefer tossing a coin, or rolling a fair dice, than using an RNG from a computer I don't trust.
I don't think that's paranoid at all. It's probably smart. Ever heard of someone that sent 1 bitcoin to the sha hash of "" ? i bet their computer did that to them.

so then the way you figured out your dice was fair is you put it in saltwater if not then not sure how you could know it is fair. and even then, i'm not sure that's a 100% guarantee. does a dice need to be retested for bias every so often? Huh