Originally published at: Satoshi 9000: The Mechanical Random Generator for Crypto Keys - Boing Boing
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I mean, it kinda figures; with all the crypto-bs attached to it, it had to be a overengineered, power hungry, useless machine with the name “satoshi”.
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That’s some cute engineering and no mistake, but i’ll fecklessly assert that time between radioactive decay events (amongst others) remain a more efficient and un-disputably random means of producing random (‘entropy’) inputs.
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I’m more focused on this loud contraption that’s trying to buy politicians on both sides of the aisle who’ll help promote and protect shaky cryptocurrency pyramid schemes.
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Is this guy punking us?
- How is this any better than a million other ways of creating randomness?
- Just because you have a nicely randomly generated key, it doesn’t mean your wallet is “unhackable”. You just need to be socially engineered appropriately to give it up.
To be fair, I only watched the first few minutes of this video before I go bored and annoyed.
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My gaming group’s Box O’ Dice ™, containing at least a couple hundred dice collected over years, would like a word…
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Yeah, what they ^ said. I was just thinking “record the sound of a cup of coins on your phone, hash the sound file a few times.”
The inventor claims it’s air-gapped and wipes after every use, but the complexity ensures you can’t actually verify that.
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This isn’t a new invention. Any casino will have one of these, just without all the bells and whistles.
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Let us recall this joke from the mini-series, Chernobyl:
“What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces? A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!”
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This tickled a memory about a machine and rolling dice.
My search-engine-fu is not good.
And then I remembered I’d probably seen it here on boing boing, because it was a wonderful thing.
The (non-secure) link still works. Video is there. Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator - GamesByEmail
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I had exactly that scene in my head when I wrote the post. thnx 
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This reminds me of a long conversation (well, mostly me listening) to the math/cryptology ‘lab’ members over lunch on the issue of “what is random?”. One of their conclusions was you couldn’t construct a real world sized (that is, non-quantum molecular sized) machine, no matter how Rube-Goldbergian*, which wouldn’t settle into some statistically predictable cycle from a prior state. That is, the dice (in this case) do rattle about along the same, no matter how convoluted, path ‘on average’ during each cycle; so a particular dice showing …‘five’ could be shown to show ‘three’ with a greater than 0.xyz probability next time [gormless shrug]
(*Heath Robinson, if you happen to be British)
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So it takes, what, 20 seconds to flip a coin or roll a dice? Just how long is it going to take to generate a reasonable-length random key? Hours?
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