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2026-08-08 23:01:11 UTC
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drgo on Nostr: That is an interesting statement and it raises an important topic. You can verify ...

That is an interesting statement and it raises an important topic. You can verify your entropy gets included but what you can not verify with a computer is the amount of entropy actually present…

You can estimate the amount of entropy _you_ generate by accounting for all possible outcomes of some physical process you performed (dice rolls, entropia seeds, coin flips, etc) and in a perfect world your estimate would be exactly accurate. But no coin if perfectly 50-50 and no dice roll is perfectly random…but close enough, usually…probably…and if it weren’t you’d probably be able to tell…right? How? Well, if your coin came up heads 50 times in a row you’d probably get a new coin. But to rigorously quantify this?

Can you verify a computer is generating the amount of entropy you expect? This gets a little complicated and beyond the scope of my current understanding, but as far as I can reason the best you can do is output a large number of entropy bits from the computer and run statistical tests … but what tests and what sorts of statistical probabilistic / guarantees one can get and at what time cost I do not know.