Overview - AmagiInstitute/random GitHub Wiki

This project goal is to collect content about pseudorandom number generation for Ethereum: collect existing research and conduct our own.

It is not trivial to get pseudorandomness into the EVM because it is deterministic and radically transparent.

Please be aware, that random number generation on the blockchain is an unsolved problem still :) All data belonging to a contract can be read publicly by anyone (any internal state of the generator inclusive) and relying on the previous block/nonce is also breakable as every transaction that runs in the same block will have access to the same parent infos. (from Reddit)

This was the case a year ago, and still is. Using a single authenticated data feed - an oracle creates a bottleneck and will probably scale poorly, and using data from the blockchain itself can be potentially manipulated by miners.

There is currently a lot of community effort dedicated to solving provable pseudorandomness issue in Ethereum. We can envision that a new communication paradigm of running cryptographically verifiable code on decentralised public virtual machines will go beyond Ethereum project, and solving provably random randomness issue is a useful task outside of Ethereum community.

This collection, started in April 2016, was inspired by neatly described Gluk256's RNG proposals