randao VS eth2.0-dafny

There's really no "forcing", in sharding validators are randomly assigned to a shard, similarly to how they're currently randomly split up into committees that attest to the validity of blocks. There's no centralizing force: the randomness into the process is provided in a decentralized fashion by the validators themselves, through a mechanism called RANDAO.

Article author here.

Great questions, should have explored the randomness beacon more. Ethereum uses [RANDAO](https://github.com/randao/randao), which is a distributed commit-reveal scheme where participants in the generation post a hash of their data on the commit portion and then at a later timestamp reveal the data preimage, and get slashed if they do not reveal a correct preimage. Then all participant data is aggregated together. This means if there is at least one honest participant the generation will be random.

A supermajority (2/3rds) of validators is required to finalize a block, in case of a 50-50 network partition blocks would stop being finalized and attestation rewards would stop. Non-participating validators would slowly leak stake through the inactivity leak until online validators once again had a supermajority. This is the "self-healing" mechanism that allows both safety and liveness.

https://github.com/randao/randao Is this what you’re referring to? It says it’s a DAO.

So according to this generating randoms for the eth chain is like validating but with shorter cycle and more profitable. Now I have even more questions like: How can I participate Is there software like prysm for using random contracts What is the minimum stake for random contracts Is anyone doing this, is it wort it

Thank you Eric, I discussed it too in the PoolTogether discord and got this reponse from one of the founders: " What you're describing is a version of "RANDAO". See here: https://github.com/randao/randao Really, the VRF is an unnecessary step if a seed is being selected by all participants If you look through the above project, you'll see they try to handle a few corner cases like if a user refuses to reveal their seed, or preventing a seed from being used twice The trouble with Randao is the amount of coordination and expense that it incurs. " I understand ETH 2.0 will be doing some implementation of RANDAO along VDFs for the Beacon chain. Algorand implements this too. I found this talk from Justin Drake talking about this algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI

> The implementations are also very close to formally verified if not fully formally verified.

So is Eth2, see "Formal Verification of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain" by Franck Cassez, Joanne Fuller, Aditya Asgaonkar, paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12909) and source code (https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny). More efforts to formally verify Eth2 is ongoing as well, by different entities.

> Nothing is perfect but cryptographic code has to be pretty bulletproof or a lot of systems would get owned

Same with Ethereum. The chance of having a major impact with a vulnerability is even higher I'd argue, as you can easily extract currency you can trade for USD, and the entire network is inter-connected, so finding targets to exploit becomes even easier.

Point still stands that cryptography goes over a lot of peoples head, but you don't hear those people complaining that because they don't understand it, no one does.

Things can get pretty complicated fast, with lots of assert statements: