Random beacons as part of a longest chain protocol

[jsoares]

Randomness generation is a critical problem for the design of secure decentralized consensus protocols. Most random beacons proposed, for example, in longest-chain protocols are predictable many rounds in advance. For many use-cases, a random beacon should be both unbiasable and unpredictable. Could we incorporate to a longest-chain protocol a random beacon that is both unbiasable and unpredictable?

Potential directions:

• VDF-based random beacons

Related reading: PoSAT

Why is it important in Filecoin?

In Filecoin, our randomness is currently generated by a decentralized protocol run by parties external to our consensus protocol: drand. This fragilizes the decentralized property of our protocol and ideally we would like to have a randomness generated internally as part of the consensus.