I am delighted to see the recent news coverage about the Ouroboros paper being accepted to Crypto 17, the most prestigious cryptography event of the year. No other blockchain protocol, apart from Bitcoin, has achieved this level of academic peer review. This is recognition from the academic community that this paper is a serious contribution to cryptography, in being the first…

It is well known that randomness is a fundamental resource for secure cryptographic schemes. All common encryption and authentication schemes are only as secure as their randomness sources are good. Using a poor randomness source can basically render insecure every cryptographic scheme that would otherwise be secure. In many cases, it is sufficient to have a trustworthy local…