Distributed randomness, drand, and the League of Entropy

“The coin to us is sacred.” - Thomas Shelby (Peaky Blinders)

Public randomness – or “flipping coins” in some way so that anyone can see (and trust) the outcome – is fundamental to numerous social and technical processes. Besides gambling and lotteries (obviously), we need public randomness to choose a sample of some population fairly. The ancient Greeks used sortition, or selection by random lottery, to appoint political officials to office. For over five centuries from 1268 until 1797, the Republic of Venice used a impressively bizarre 10-round process, alternating between preferential elections and random selection, in choosing its Doge or highest official. Modern society uses random sampling of eligible citizens to elect juries, in military drafts, to perform risk-limiting audits on elections, and so on.