A place for talking about the Ethereum Virtual Machine on Farcaster.

Have there been any good usecases of PREVRANDAO yet? Are we able to use it to reliably generate better entropy on-chain without relying on Chainlink?

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

PREVRANDAO was never a good randomness solution, neither was DIFFICULT, the opcodes it replaced.  It was introduced to keep lotto dapps which used difficulty as a prng from breaking.  It was at one point proposed to be called RANDOM but was given a more accurate name.

… and the shall know me by my speling errors.

Opinions are my own. 

Ethereum Core Developer and Fanboy. 

ex-@Oracle, ex-@Google, ex-@ConsenSys.

I do remember the history, but I was hoping people figured out some fun use cases for it that aren't "keep the DIFFICULTY opcode working" 🙃

prevrandao is better than difficulty because it can't be biased by block proposers, all they can do is not propose a block if they don't like its random value

great post on the state of randomness here:

Security at Optimism. Formerly built Umbra and more at ScopeLift

prevrandao is better than difficulty because it can't be biased by block proposers, all they can do is not propose a block if they don't like its random value

great post on the state of randomness here: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2023/01/eth-rng

I think you hit the essence of the randomness issue by bringing up that the best solutions are not all on chain.