Comment by jimbobthrowawy
8 months ago
>I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier
Is there much of a market for that? I thought random.org had it all sewn up.
8 months ago
>I have spent far too long dealing with this as an RNG supplier
Is there much of a market for that? I thought random.org had it all sewn up.
No, random.org isn't in that market at all, aside from doing some drawings local to them and unofficial games.
I think we are only one of ~3 TRNG suppliers who have been audited. Many games don't use a TRNG, though.
Since it uses atmospheric noise, you can also influence the numbers from random.org by transmitting radio waves in the area nearby - the operator of random.org has mentioned that there's so much RF activity that he is concerned about whether the bits are still random. A final issue is that they are also so low-volume that they probably can't get enough test data for the required audits (which can be a lot of data).
To underscore the volume question: Random.org used to have a running count of bits generated. The counter wasn't monotonic (before it broke in ~2015-2019), but the peak value I saw when I checked archive.org was about 250 GiB total since 1998 (that was in 2015). That is one quarter of the size of our "light" qualification test ("heavy" is 16 TiB). The RNG auditors also take O(100) megabytes for each audit, which would be a significant fraction of random.org's output.
honestly this is fascinating to me, I was curious too and upon searching "RNG Supplier" I couldn't find anything, 3 supplies in the whole world is a crazy supply-side industry!
I was just curious to see what a landing page of a RNG supplier looked like, how do you even do sales for such a thing? With 3 players I guess it's just something you know in the industry and those partnerships are likely long-lived, right?
niches like this fascinate me for some reason!
> Is there much of a market for that?
I don't think it's a huge market, but state-run lotteries around the world need good random number generators for games without physical balls (like Keno for example).
I've talked with people that have created RNGs (rather than buying off-the-shelf solutions) and it sounds like soul-crushing work - mostly due to dealing with the government regulators that need to give final approval before the RNG can actually be put into production.
Gaming machines are highly regulated, almost like medical devices.
There are seals on the hardware, any modification must be approved, you must certify that the payout is the expected one, ...
I'd say worse than medical. As long as it works and doesn't fail, no one will give a fuck about medical hardware or the condition it's in. Just look at your average GP's ultrasound, it's probably older than the GP themselves is.
Gambling however, you constantly have government auditors and the tax office crawling up your literal arse to make sure you don't cheat the gamblers, or worse, the government out of their money. And in some cases, add the mob or other criminals on top who also want their cut.
Gambling is shady to begin with. It’s easy to say that all businesses only care about money, but gambling is pure greed, from both the customer’s and proprietor’s perspectives. Sure, there is greed in medical but gambling is ONLY greed.
Yep, governments can change, and the new one can decide to crank up the regulation too.
Pretty sure it's your figurative arse but potato, pot-ahh-toh
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It's worse than medical devices, at least for the final machines and software.
For components in the path of money flow (payment processors, RNGs, hosting, etc.), it's similar.