I fucking love beacons. It's really cool that NIST actually built one, and the explanations in this thread about the improvements to 2.0 are very illuminating.
My favourite things to think about with beacons are (i) can you make a practical beacon where you don't have to trust an authority (who might be calculating outcomes in advance) and (ii) how would you make a gigabit beacon (this one is << kbit)
This beacon still requires that you trust NIST. This issue is mitigated to some extent by the option to mix outputs from multiple beacons (cool!). But those authorities could still be colluding, and there are existence proofs of seemingly cleaner things -- taking the least significant bit of the NASDAQ, or (my favourite) looking at brightness fluctuations of distant stars (anyone can buy a telescope and a photodiode and get a bit stream). These seem (to me) more decoupled from nefarious meddling.
The starlight thing seems to me to be both trustworthy, tamper-resistant, and easily decentralized, but it is going to be really slow. Why are all the decent beacons we know about seemingly limited to <<kHz? Anyone have ideas for a gigabit beacon?
My favourite things to think about with beacons are (i) can you make a practical beacon where you don't have to trust an authority (who might be calculating outcomes in advance) and (ii) how would you make a gigabit beacon (this one is << kbit)
This beacon still requires that you trust NIST. This issue is mitigated to some extent by the option to mix outputs from multiple beacons (cool!). But those authorities could still be colluding, and there are existence proofs of seemingly cleaner things -- taking the least significant bit of the NASDAQ, or (my favourite) looking at brightness fluctuations of distant stars (anyone can buy a telescope and a photodiode and get a bit stream). These seem (to me) more decoupled from nefarious meddling.
The starlight thing seems to me to be both trustworthy, tamper-resistant, and easily decentralized, but it is going to be really slow. Why are all the decent beacons we know about seemingly limited to <<kHz? Anyone have ideas for a gigabit beacon?