The random number they generated is 53.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Truly random. I would have never guessed that one.
Mine said 42. I guess the only thing left I'm wondering is what was the question?
What ever happened to Cloudflares wall of lava lamps?
They don't have quantum in the name.
Having worked in the field and having seen my fair share of supposedly "true" random numbers, I would really like to see how they would proof this bold claim.
First one to hack the bitcoin blockchain wins
I'm crypto-neutral and quantum-skeptical but this seems like a legit threat.
The other major cryptos have moved to a proof-of-stake which is more centralized, but also more flexible. For example I can easily imagine ETH upgrading to post-quantum cryptography.
But Bitcoin is much less flexible. It has never evolved past proof-of-work. It's much harder for me to imagine a unified upgrade for post-quantum BTC.
I mean, your non-upgraded coins being worthless should be a pretty solid motivator.
*as random as any other method
For a number to be truly random (assuming positive integers) wouldn’t it have to be anywhere between 1 and infinity? What good is a 20 million digit long integer? Or a 103 billion digit long integer?
What I mean is, is it possible to even have a truly random number within a set of rules, say 1-100?
I guess I already gave a rule by saying positive integers, I don’t know this is crazy!
But have you ever come up with a random number on weeeeeeeeed, mannnnn
If you select a number “fairly” (ie every number equally likely, not skewed towards smaller numbers) and your scale goes to infinity, I’m pretty sure the number you get out will be infinitely long, almost always (sure, you could get the number 10, but infinity is… infinite, so any number that gets picked will tend to be beyond anything we ever experience or know how to write down)
To put it another way, using your scheme, we’d only ever need 1 random number ever, it’d just keep printing forever and we could cut up chunks of it whenever we needed some random and it would just keep printing on and on.
The issue is no random number generator can be truely random because the number will always be seeded by something that isn't technically random
Even cloudflare came up with a pretty "random" method of seeding their encryption keys with a wall of lava lamps, but even the program that takes the video feed of their lava lamps can theoretically be reverse engineered to process the same feed of lava lamps the same way to get the same results.
That’s like the subsets of infinity which are also infinite? I’ve seen videos online that are really interesting to me but I’m no mathematician
Pretty much, yeah. If you assume the number will be somewhere “in the middle”, then pick any number to be in the middle of 0 and infinity, you’ll always find you can double the number and still not be at infinity, so eventually you have to conclude that the halfway point is also infinity.
Is it truly random though? If in a specific point in time, the number generated is always the same, then that's not truly random.
Absolute true randomness would be a different result every time it is generated in that specific point in time.
A bit Sci-Fi and probably unrealistic opinion, but it does make me curious about how this kind of randomness could be implemented.
I mean, when you collapse that logic you're effectively saying random is the same thing as non-deterministic. But they're different things, because even if an infinitesimally exact moment in time may "always" produce the same result, because the arrow of time only points in one direction, no such deterministic result can ever be replicated, and if the result cannot be replicated, then what is the difference from random?
this is not a bad point but it also feels a bit like moving the goal posts
literally every new discovery: exists
capitalists: can we make money with this