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Comment by edent

13 hours ago

I'm not so sure. If you wanted to be deliberate, you'd choose a plausible value that you could control.

No one is going to suspect `98761316832165974216498789746` is anything other than random. But `000000000000000123` looks suspicious.

But that would be obviously intentional. Much more plausible deniability with 0x4.

Why are many of them, suspicious?

  • The probability of getting a 0 is the same for every digit. However, in my opinion, the probability of getting a number that starts with two zeros is 1/10 * 1/10, and the probability of getting a number that starts with the same two digits is 10 * 1/10 * 1/10.

    But the probability to receive one number or the other are the same.

  • By random chance you probably wouldn't get that many zeros. Of course, one could say it's just as random as any other string, but..