The beacon to be guarded at all times by Ralphie??

NIST v2: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...

NIST v2: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...

Then one could dynamically and randomly choose which randomness beacon to use! I like it.

There are good uses for block-chain like things, even beyond sprinking in a mention to help raise grant funding, but the headline-grabbers have generally not been those...

It must be since they use a blockchain for this to decentralized and verify the timestamps.

Because, firstly, this is a university, not some rando self-hosting, and secondly, you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. This means that a dedicated adversary can potentially work out what the outcome will be. For something like the use cases they mention - jury selection, lottery, etc. - you want actual randomness.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness

From tfa:

Often, randomness is thought of as something you want to keep hidden, such as when generating passwords or cryptographic keys. However, there are many applications where an independent and public source of randomness is useful. For example, randomizing public audits, selecting candidates for jury duty, or fairly assigning resources through a lottery.

Sometimes you need publicly verifiable randomness, and then your own hardware (which you might or might not even trust privately, depending on how much you trust your vendors) isn’t much help.

If you still think that's idiotic, I'm happy to bet against you in an unbiased* coin flip simulated on my machine which you unfortunately can't inspect :)

Ever taken a stats class? Recall the "table of random values" in the back of the book? That's why

The idea here is that it's a public, traceable generation of random numbers. So, if the two of us wanted to flip a coin to settle a disagreement, we could agree on some future value of this beacon (unknowable to us at the moment) to use as the source of entropy, then let one of us choose heads or tails, telling the other person what we chose. Then we wait until the agreed time, check the beacon, and boom, a fair coin toss, which we can be fairly certain wasn't manipulated by either of us.

One would want to use something like HKDF[1] to create derived values with domain separation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKDF