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btilly06/16/20253 repliesview on HN

It isn't quantum, but as far as I know https://www.random.org/ is sufficiently random for any purpose that I can think of for publicly verifiable random numbers.

(Most of the demand for random numbers, of course, comes from cryptography. In which case public verifiability of what the random thing was is the last thing that you want.)


Replies

jasperry06/16/2025

How is random.org publicly verifiable? As far as I know, there's no way to prove that a certain set of numbers was produced by random.org at a certain time.

The public verifiability is the real "quantum" advance of this research; probably the title should say that. Of course, it's true that when you don't need public verifiability, your OS's entropy pool + PRNG is good enough for any currently known scenario.

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JKCalhoun06/16/2025

For simple electronics circuits, reverse-biasing a transistor past its breakdown voltage will give you "noise" — an ADC will give you random values.

I don't know how statistically random it is — suspect it is quantum in nature though since we're dealing with transistors.

(EDIT: checked with ChatGPT, has a sense of humor: "Be careful not to exceed the maximum reverse voltage ratings, or you’ll get more “magic smoke” than white noise.")

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zokier06/16/2025

NIST has operated public random beacon since at least 2013, and League of Entropy has operated distributed beacon from 2019.

Public randomness does have uses in cryptography, crypto is not only secret keys.

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