The most eye-catching news in the circle these days is probably that the ColdCard hardware wallet was emptied. A compilation switch buried five years ago quietly disabled the hardware random number generator, causing the seed to degrade into a pseudo-random number that could be predicted—wiping out more than a hundred million dollars’ worth of Bitcoin.
After reading it, I can only offer one reflection: once randomness can be calculated in advance, it’s no longer random.
This also reminds me of a detail in the consensus process that @Dusk keeps arguing over: how do you choose the next block producer?
You might ask, how hard can it be? To be fair, everyone must be able to verify the random outcome; to be secure, nobody must be able to guess it in advance. These two requirements collide—it’s genuinely awkward. Dusk uses a deterministic lottery, abbreviated as DS, aiming to satisfy both.
It didn’t bother with any fancy randomness source. <c-1/>#dusk simply puts eligible stakers into a queue, iterates through them one by one using the current round’s “score,” and whoever has enough weight gets selected. Where do the scores come from? It uses SHA3 to hash together the previous block’s seed, the round, and the step, producing a unique, reproducible result that everyone can recompute and verify themselves.
The trick here all lies in the “seed.” For every new block, the block producer must use its own signature to sign again on the previous block’s seed, as the seed for the next round. It’s like a lottery machine—rules are public and everyone can audit, yet no one can know in advance who will win next.
$DUSK here is the lottery’s weighting currency: the more you stake, the higher your weight, and the greater your probability of being selected. But each time you’re selected, your weight decreases by one to prevent big whales from grabbing the whole “committee.”
I think the clever part is that it doesn’t hand “randomness” to a centralized lottery machine. Instead, it combines publicly verifiable rules with an unpredictable seed, welding fairness and security together. Of course, the prerequisite is that the seed is truly unpredictable and the staking is truly distributed—those still need to be assessed with later data. For the DUSK coin, you’ve got to do your own homework; don’t just take my word for it.
After reading it, I can only offer one reflection: once randomness can be calculated in advance, it’s no longer random.
This also reminds me of a detail in the consensus process that @Dusk keeps arguing over: how do you choose the next block producer?
You might ask, how hard can it be? To be fair, everyone must be able to verify the random outcome; to be secure, nobody must be able to guess it in advance. These two requirements collide—it’s genuinely awkward. Dusk uses a deterministic lottery, abbreviated as DS, aiming to satisfy both.
It didn’t bother with any fancy randomness source. <c-1/>#dusk simply puts eligible stakers into a queue, iterates through them one by one using the current round’s “score,” and whoever has enough weight gets selected. Where do the scores come from? It uses SHA3 to hash together the previous block’s seed, the round, and the step, producing a unique, reproducible result that everyone can recompute and verify themselves.
The trick here all lies in the “seed.” For every new block, the block producer must use its own signature to sign again on the previous block’s seed, as the seed for the next round. It’s like a lottery machine—rules are public and everyone can audit, yet no one can know in advance who will win next.
$DUSK here is the lottery’s weighting currency: the more you stake, the higher your weight, and the greater your probability of being selected. But each time you’re selected, your weight decreases by one to prevent big whales from grabbing the whole “committee.”
I think the clever part is that it doesn’t hand “randomness” to a centralized lottery machine. Instead, it combines publicly verifiable rules with an unpredictable seed, welding fairness and security together. Of course, the prerequisite is that the seed is truly unpredictable and the staking is truly distributed—those still need to be assessed with later data. For the DUSK coin, you’ve got to do your own homework; don’t just take my word for it.