[Cryptography] A Scheme for Verifiable Lottery

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 10:46:57AM +0000, Roland C. Dowdeswell wrote:
> 
> For a large scale lottery, you might be able to use something like
> the closing price of a series of stock exchanges on a particular
> day.  That would certainly meet the criteria that it is more
> expensive to influence the results than you'd make from any given
> lottery.  I'm not quite so sure about the unpredictability.  But,
> then, you could make it harder to predict by, say, hasing every
> single transaction on a series of stock exchanges over a two week
> period or something.

For a more detailed analysis of this idea, see section 3 of RFC
3797[1], "Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random
Selection", written by Donald Eastlake in 2004.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3797

							- Ted