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Gavin Andresen, known as the former lead developer of Bitcoin, has recently broken his long silence on his Twitter account with the following tweet mentioning a recent project that is known as the Random Sanity Project.
Security breaches
While the Random Sanity Project’s (RSP) main vision is to secure the Internet by verifying sources of randomness that comes from different entities, Andresen also aims to solve the problems that monetary software systems like cryptocurrencies experience due to the lack of available data on the Internet.
Andresen also mentioned that he is well aware of the importance of the security of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Once the security has been breached, people will lose money which will result in a lot of users reacting violently. Andresen makes this claim as he has been keeping tabs on Bitcoin and has observed a lot of system problems that have stemmed out, such as faulty data generation. Even the smallest mistake and small breaches like these have already negatively affected the whole Bitcoin community.
Such security breaches were seen in an incident in August 2013, where Bitcoin wallets operated on Android became vulnerable to security breaches. Two years later, in May 2015, there was another fault in the Bitcoin wallet system which caused a lot of Bitcoin investors to lose significant amounts of money. This was caused by the random number generator which provided insufficient data to be used with Android operating systems. This is the exact thing that the RSP project is designed to address.
While the RSP is beneficial to Bitcoin, as it will aid in preventing potential security breaches, it is not directly associated with Bitcoin at all. Rather, it is an independent project for helping digital monetary systems.
Status of the RSP project
Andresen has already been working on this project for more than six months and is steadily making progress. When the project is complete, Andresen states that he would not want to make it into a profit generating project. Rather, he wants to make it a free system like Linux wherein there will be a sponsor behind it.
Verification system
The RSP works as a verification system that will tell the user whether random bytes are “true” or “false.” The system does that by determining whether the numbers are random or not. If they are random, they are classified as “true.” This is a very important aspect of how systems work their data because if bytes lose their randomness, the data could become invalid. There are, in fact, a lot of factors that can affect randomness such as software and system upgrades. Other factors include work from a third party person or a breach.
The RSP aims to check for randomness in the bytes so that developers will be able to prevent any disasters in the system. This is beneficial to a lot of people, especially those who deal with investing in digital currencies like Bitcoin.