Posted by AJTSheppard 10/23/2024
Show HN: Satoshi9000 analog BTC key generator (mechanical)
The Satoshi 9000 demo: https://youtu.be/bJiOia5PoGE
The key value proposition of the machine is that it generates analog randomness in the physical world and converts it into digital (1’s and 0’s) randomness. Seamlessly.
But it occurs to me that it may have other uses beyond crypto keys for your own use, such as: * Randomized clinical trials. Clinical trials need a high degree of transparency for ethical reasons; also, for legal reasons should it come to light after the trial has ended that patient selection and treatment selection was not random or in some way biased (say, by the researchers themselves). The machine described herein can provide that transparency to young and old patients, technical and non- technical. * Non-technical management. Many network engineers in need of security keys have bosses that are non-technical. Such managers might prefer security keys (and their generation) which are easier for them to understand. * Estate planning. Suppose members of a family were to inherit digital assets (such as Bitcoin, for example). Not all members of the family are technical and understand Bitcoin. However, each will still need to generate a secure Bitcoin key to receive their share of the inheritance. The machine described herein might help in that task because its source of randomness is more easily understood by laypeople and each can generate their own private key in private (in isolation with the machine). * Anywhere where the users have to have an intuitive understanding of how the randomness is being created; whether they are 5 years old, or 95 years old, and all ages in between.
I'm curious to know if any of the folks over at HN can think of other use cases?
So what I typically do is print a warning at the top and bottom of the printout urging the user to transcribe the important parts using archival paper and pen as soon as they can.
Also, if you look at the video, you will see an "Archival Printer" port on the front of the control box because I’m developing a printer that prints the keys (plus QR codes) on metal so they last for decades and perhaps centuries. That may be useful in estate planning where the key may be locked away in a safe, or a lawyers safe, for generations. But transcribing to archival paper and pen is relatively permanent (decades) and is easy and seems to work well (lawyers like it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...
I think it would be a stretch to think you could pull a random person off the street, point to a wall of lava lamps, and ask "do you see the randomness, how does it work?" Whereas, I think if you pull a random person off the street, let them watch the Satoshi9000 do its thing, and ask "do you see the randomness, how does it work?" you might get an answer that makes sense.
That, in a nutshell, is the value proposition behind the Satoshi9000.
When I showed the machine to my son, Nate, a mechanical engineer, he thought it looked like something from a 1950's sci-fi movie like "Forbidden Planet". Back then, plastics were high-tech and new, and with the acrylic domes, the Satoshi9000 would not look out of place on the set of that movie.
He suggested that every coffee table should have one!
Likely thousands of HNers viewed the link. 100+ upvoted. A couple of random accounts (individual(s)? bots?) leave similar comments.
And then somehow those comments are supposed to reflect a wider sentiment of some community or population?
I suggest that any system like this has the output XOR'ed with another random source. If two random sources are XOR'ed together, then both need to be predictable for the output to be predictable.
what is the point in having a source of randomness if you need to XOR with a random source? relatedly, if you have a source of randomness, (1) please share and (2) well, there's no real need to go down this particular rabbit hole at all, well, is there?
independent of all of that, you seem to be anthropomorphizing the XOR function a bit... sure, there are some contexts where "1"s "mean" something and "0"s don't (sparse coding? and yeah, that is some pretty generous contortion, but hey: we're all friends here, right?), but in the case of "randomness"* the whole point (presumably) is that predicting "1"s and predicting "0"s are both exactly the same thing: Sisyphean.
i'm not sure that the word "random" "means" any thing beyond "distribution that we cannot model". which is a fine definition, given that models are how we attack random number generation...
* mind you i challenge the reader to pray tell what "randomness" even really means in anything other than a pseudorandom context (aka used to justify the randomness of various algorithms). isn't it oddly instructive that we use something that would pass as a proxy for "random"ness as the basis for our official definition for the second? (Cesium-133). the "second" is no more real than it is random. random is defined via a threshold of non-randomness, and all that we value as discrete and integral in the world that exists beyond our minds (-- if it does, in fact, even exist (or even "exist")--) is a house built upon sand. well, worse than that: the universe "works" because Avogadro's Number is a hell of a lot closer to infinity than it is to zero, and that's good enough for me. log(N) < 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_...
But that only requires you to run the machine with the same coins/dice in the shakers for two consecutive cycles. And to repeatedly do so into you have generated the desired length of 0/1 bit stream.
Bear in mind the machine is fully configurable/programmable. You always choose what goes into the shakers, how many cycles are run, for how long they shake, how vigorously they shake, and what are done with with the 1's and 0's that result.
Implementing Von Neuman's algorithm on the Satoshi9000 is trivial.
Not fully actually:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#ClaMe...
[0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...
That's a quite interesting idea. I will put more thought into that.
Thanks!