Joseph Bonneau: Public Randomness, Blockchains and Proofs-of-delay

A public, unpredictable source of randomness would enable many exciting applications, starting with verifiable public lotteries. It is an essential building block for many types of smart contract requiring random inputs, from online games to random audits. This talk will define this important fundamental problem and describe potentially solutions using proof-of-work based blockchains. The problem appears to require a new cryptographic primitive, the proof-of-delay: a deterministic, inherently sequential, pseudorandom function with compact, easily-verifiable proofs of correctness. Several approaches to constructing a proof-of-delay will be proposed.