At a guess, it is 18000% susceptible to government interference, meaning you'd have to read 180 announcements like this before you got to one that wasn't active

At a guess, it is 18000% susceptible to government interference, meaning you'd have to read 180 announcements like this before you got to one that wasn't actively created by the government. (Not just "interfered with" after the fact, but actively created for the express purpose of being predictable by them.) First let me explain how prior probability works to you guys. Imagine that I tell you these two facts: there is a bag (perhaps very large) with both fair coins and exceedingly unfair coins in it - such as coins so heavily weighted that they land "heads" approximately 90% of the time. You draw a coin at random and flip it a few times, and get the sequence: heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. (10 heads.) What do you think the likelihood is that you drew a fair coin? You might think it's exceedingly unlikely. However, if I then told you there were 2046 fair coins and only two weighted coins in the bag, it turns out you'd be down to 50/50. If there were a billion fair coins and 1 weighted coin, you'd be almost certain to have drawn a fair coin. The fact that you just threw ten heads pales in comparison with the prior probability. Now what we're looking at is that you flipped it ten times and it seems totally normal. But the bag is full of ten thousand heavily weighted coins and only one fair coin. It doesn't matter how great ("fair") the announcement looks, because we know from historical reasons the prior probability that it's actually fair. Reading through the announcement with these eyes you get: >However, demonstrably unpredictable values are not possible to obtain in any classical physical context. Which is pretty absurd. Reading the brownian motion of molecules with a sensor will not allow anyone to predict when the next molecule hit. XOR-ing two classical independent processes so that the second process has no access to the first and vice versa removes any remaining possibility of error. If any source in an independent xor chain is random the rest can be weighted and it's no problem, because xor is a commutative operation, you can rewrite the chain so the random source is last, and it will act as an OTP. So just a couple of low-tech classical noisy sources of entropy are more than enough. Instead we have a very sophisticated setup that can be backdoored at a very low level, and almost certainly is. A plausible reason for this announcement is so that writers of backdoored cryptography can use the output of this as a putatively random seed, both claiming an honest mistake for using it in cryptography, and also perhaps writing architecture that seems not to require a truly random source but can in fact be broken by a source whose upcoming values are known to the government. What you're looking at is almost surely a government program to help other government programmers produce broken cryptography. When combined with the prior probability, there is almost no chance (perhaps 1 in 200) that the architecture in the write-up has been produced for any other purpose, or cannot be predicted by someone having access to the sequence and special information on the process used to produce it. - EDIT: downvoters don't understand the analysis. Sorry.