[sandpaper26]

Can someone give an example use case of this? I'm not sure I understand why a very public long string of random characters on a block chain is useful, except as a way to prove an event didn't happen prior to a certain time

[nonameiguess]

The draft of the version upgrade explains the possible uses of this: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2019/NIST.IR.8213-draft...

Mostly, it's so the public can verify events that were supposed to be random really were random. The executive summary gives plenty of examples, but think of a pro sports draft lottery. Fans always think those are rigged. They could simply use these outputs and a hashing function that maps a 512-bit block to some set with cardinality equal to the number of slots and pre-assign slots to participating teams based on their draft weight. Then fans could verify using this public API that the draw the league claims came up randomly really did come up randomly.

People always think polls are rigged. This could be used to publicly produce random population samples for polling.

This was also used to prove a Bell inequality experiment worked with no loopholes.

[codetrotter]

If they want to believe the polls are rigged, won’t they just assume that the NIST random data is “rigged” as well.

[somat]

The mob "numbers game" Which my understanding was a sort of lottery used low digits of closing share prices to find the winning number. which solved a few of the same problems. It was an unaffiliated third party generating the numbers with another completely different unaffiliated third party (the newspaper) distributing them. so theoretically every one trusted them as fair numbers.

[fanf2]

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37783764