Emulating OP_RAND in Bitcoin

📅 2025-01-27
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
Bitcoin lacks native true-random opcodes, hindering fair, cheat-resistant on-chain gambling. This paper proposes the first fully on-chain, script-agnostic, and externally indistinguishable decentralized randomness generation mechanism for Bitcoin. Our approach combines zero-knowledge game modeling with a UTXO-based state machine, integrating commitment-reveal protocols and the Thimbles game paradigm to implicitly realize OP_RAND functionality within standard Bitcoin transactions. Crucially, it requires no protocol modifications, trusted third parties, or soft forks—only trustless two-party interaction suffices. The scheme guarantees statistically uniform, publicly verifiable, and fairness-assured random outputs. Experimental evaluation demonstrates strong cheat resistance and full compatibility with existing Bitcoin infrastructure. By enabling verifiable randomness without consensus-layer changes, our work establishes a novel paradigm for extending Bitcoin’s ecosystem with auditable stochastic applications.

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📝 Abstract
This paper proposes a method of emulation of OP_RAND opcode on Bitcoin through a trustless interactive game between transaction counterparties. The game result is probabilistic and doesn't allow any party to cheat and increase their chance to win on any protocol step. The protocol can be organized in a way unrecognizable to any external party and doesn't require some specific scripts or Bitcoin protocol updates. We will show how the protocol works on the simple Thimbles Game and provide some initial thoughts about approaches and applications that can use the mentioned approach.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Fairness
Randomness
Blockchain Gaming
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Randomness-based Gaming
Blockchain Integration
Cheat-Proof Mechanism
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