Bitcoin Forum

I've seen some talk about this recently, I thought I better check my assertions.

Also, this is not about the recent Android wallet issues, which was about random numbers, but was a bug.

Take 3 available functions, they all on request within 1/100th of a second generate 64 random bits.

A: Uses a standard common generator.
B: Uses one of the best open source cryptographically oriented generators instructed to take all allocated time to generate the value.
C: Uses a web service that receives values from decay of an alpha source.

Can I tell to a statistically significant degree, which generated a given group of bits?

Manually? No
Using any available software? I don't know.
Using any available software between B and C? I imagine not.

So, even if definitive proof exists/arrises that C uses a fundamentally random process, is it ever relevant that B is only 'sudo' random?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographically_secure_pseudorandom_number_generator) is what you're looking for.

By definition, a good pseudorandom number generator is indifferentiable from a true random source.