Imagine the terrors of multiple government agencies synchronizing ID selection to an identical source of randomness. Congrats, you won jury duty, a tax audit AND selective service!

Sorry, can't help myself! The Ralphie running demo on the site is hilarious. Some say, you could just use Ralphie's actual runs from this past year, true randomness!

Ah, another randomness beacon! Although I wish it used the same API as NIST's beacon, either the v1 or v2 API.

I recommend to also jump to "What is the Twine Protocol" [1] where they created a blockchain without a consensus layers because they have a level of trust in timestamps.

[1] https://docs.twine.world/twine-protocol-documentation

Skobuffs!

The source of their randomness is interesting, as someone not well-versed in physics: https://random.colorado.edu/concepts/traceable-randomness

Verifiable quantum randomness sounds interesting - https://drand.love is another verifiable randomness beacon, though using more traditional cryptography

Things like these are absolutely idiotic. Every single computer, be it a laptop or desktop or a phone, are able to produce randomness. Why in the hell would you trust a random website?

A use case for a blockchain?

The idea here is that it's a public, traceable generation of random numbers. So, if the two of us wanted to flip a coin to settle a disagreement, we could agree on some future value of this beacon (unknowable to us at the moment) to use as the source of entropy, then let one of us choose heads or tails, telling the other person what we chose. Then we wait until the agreed time, check the beacon, and boom, a fair coin toss, which we can be fairly certain wasn't manipulated by either of us.

From tfa:

Often, randomness is thought of as something you want to keep hidden, such as when generating passwords or cryptographic keys. However, there are many applications where an independent and public source of randomness is useful. For example, randomizing public audits, selecting candidates for jury duty, or fairly assigning resources through a lottery.

Sometimes you need publicly verifiable randomness, and then your own hardware (which you might or might not even trust privately, depending on how much you trust your vendors) isn’t much help.

If you still think that's idiotic, I'm happy to bet against you in an unbiased* coin flip simulated on my machine which you unfortunately can't inspect :)

Ever taken a stats class? Recall the "table of random values" in the back of the book? That's why

Because, firstly, this is a university, not some rando self-hosting, and secondly, you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. This means that a dedicated adversary can potentially work out what the outcome will be. For something like the use cases they mention - jury selection, lottery, etc. - you want actual randomness.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness