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Show HN: Satoshi9000 analog BTC key generator (mechanical)
99 points by AJTSheppard 5 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 35 comments
I built this machine so I could generate Bitcoin keys that I could trust. Air-gapped and simple to use and understand (mechanical).

The Satoshi 9000 demo: https://youtu.be/bJiOia5PoGE

The key value proposition of the machine is that it generates analog randomness in the physical world and converts it into digital (1’s and 0’s) randomness. Seamlessly.

But it occurs to me that it may have other uses beyond crypto keys for your own use, such as: * Randomized clinical trials. Clinical trials need a high degree of transparency for ethical reasons; also, for legal reasons should it come to light after the trial has ended that patient selection and treatment selection was not random or in some way biased (say, by the researchers themselves). The machine described herein can provide that transparency to young and old patients, technical and non- technical. * Non-technical management. Many network engineers in need of security keys have bosses that are non-technical. Such managers might prefer security keys (and their generation) which are easier for them to understand. * Estate planning. Suppose members of a family were to inherit digital assets (such as Bitcoin, for example). Not all members of the family are technical and understand Bitcoin. However, each will still need to generate a secure Bitcoin key to receive their share of the inheritance. The machine described herein might help in that task because its source of randomness is more easily understood by laypeople and each can generate their own private key in private (in isolation with the machine). * Anywhere where the users have to have an intuitive understanding of how the randomness is being created; whether they are 5 years old, or 95 years old, and all ages in between.

I'm curious to know if any of the folks over at HN can think of other use cases?






Love it. I wonder what the distribution of rolls/tosses for this looks like. This also reminds me of an automated dice roller thingy that someone built with a hopper of dice, a conveyor to bring the dice to the top of a ramp and ocr to record all of the rolls, a "Dice-o-matic" [0]. And a vidja of it in action [1].

[0] http://gamesbyemail.com/news/diceomatic

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n8LNxGbZbs


This is pleasingly insane, congratulations! Is there a program to test the fairness of a given dice or coin? Is that a program that's even feasible to write?

I love the slow pace of the video, including a few minutes presentation of all available programs. And indeed, there are programs to test dice and coin bias:

* https://youtu.be/bJiOia5PoGE?si=IEhbNJk0C0-7_2Nj&t=229

* https://youtu.be/bJiOia5PoGE?si=3Se3lYFVAAkElx0w&t=245


You can measure the Shannon entropy of a sequence

Love this. Is the private key printed on a separate piece of paper? I saw only #####'s. How long does it take to generate a full key using dice?

Best use case I can think of is replacing the die roller in the board game trouble.

“You can pop a lot of trouble in the pop o matic bubble”


I found the video very entertaining. Very old-school. And boy, you’ve paid a lot of attention to the device. It looks very pro.

It would be nice to access it from /dev/random on a normal machine (at a very slow bitrate)

Are these like public randomness beacons? NIST[0] and Cloudflare[1] have them. I guess use cases are lotteries that are publicly verifiable, election auditing...

[0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...

[1] https://drand.love/

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/league-of-entropy/


No.

Side note: excellent unintentional ASMR once Andrew starts explaining how the machine works.

How does it read the value from the coins or dices?

At 5:44, the vid shows a webcam facing up to photograph the bottom of the coin/die through the shaker window. I guess there's some CV to read the item.

I am super dubious of mechanical systems for randomness... Newtons laws are fully predictable after all...

I suggest that any system like this has the output XOR'ed with another random source. If two random sources are XOR'ed together, then both need to be predictable for the output to be predictable.


There are two coins or die being flipped here. I am guessing they likely use the von Neumann trick for getting random data from biased sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_...


> Newtons laws are fully predictable after all...

Not fully actually:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#ClaMe...


So, to generate a random bitcoin key, that's how many coin tosses or die tosses?

The video says 128 cycles. Each cycle is 30 seconds, so it would take 64 minutes.

This is cute, I like it

During the cold war, the Washington-Moscow "nuclear" hotline was set up with teleprinters and one-time pad keys for both directions. I imagine they had an analogue randomness key generator on both ends to generate the key material.

Presumably they're using ~Dual-EC DRBG~ some kind of quantum randomness generators these days.


There was, interestingly, a much fancier system used quite a bit earlier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20138230


> The noise values used for the encryption key were originally produced by large mercury-vapor rectifying vacuum tubes and stored on a phonograph record.

That's sure a hardcore way to run an analogue randomness generator.


The beta decay enthusiasts were busy elsewhere.

awesome.

Beautiful <3

This looks interesting, but there are much better (higher bitrate) sources of pure randomness, and I'm not sure what advantage this has over those. If I don't trust the machine that's generating the randomness, that doesn't only apply to the randomness component, I similarly mistrust this machine's code, the hardware, etc.

I'm not sure what this would add over, for example, entropy derived from a hash of the image of a camera's thermal noise profile.


I'm not sure what advantage this has over those.

Those usually don't look and sound like they were made by Doc Brown.


Well said. I find the creator did a delightful job in his presentation. So much pride in the craftsmanship visible in his presentation as well as the finished product. I subscribed and hope for more videos..

it's simple

Why the thermal printer? The text fades eventually and you will lose your private keys.

Yes it really ought punch brail or something?

There is another slot below that reads "archival grade printer".

I think the cloudflare video wall is a more practical way to mass generate entropy but this is suitably madcap I enjoy it. There are also other existing methods but they're not as... clearly demonstrable... as this like is used in existing hardware TRNGs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...


People are missing the point that it is creative and gets the job done, conversation pieces can go a long way.

Am I missing something? There's not a single negative comment in the post as of now.



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