Developers working on zcash cryptocurrency, focused on protecting privacy, used Chernobyl nuclear waste at the last network secrecy ceremony.

The developers, Ryan Pierce and Andrew Miller, held their last "Powers of Tau" ceremony last weekend, including using nuclear waste to generate random numbers.

Miller said:

"Tau's powers are to safely generate and dispose of cryptographic" toxic waste. "So, what better way to generate entropy than with actual radioactive toxic waste? ? "

To ensure the privacy of the event, it occurred at 3000 feet above sea level on a small private plane in the airspace above from Illinois and Wisconsin, Miller wrote on a mailing list.

Miller said a radioactive graphite moderator acted as a source of low-level gamma and beta radiation. The graphite originated from the heart of the Chernobyl nuclear facility, which suffered a catastrophic meltdown in 1986. A Geiger tube connected to a number generator converted radioactive pulses into numbers, which were then incorporated into the code.

"The source of entropy was a random number generator based on material using a Geiger tube and a radioactive source, built and programmed by Ryan Pierce," Miller said.

Graphite emitted very low levels of radiation, "falling significantly below all thresholds that could limit its air transport, and posing no health risk," according to Miller. In fact, the amount of radiation emitted is only a few times the level of background radiation that people receive on Earth, Pierce said in a video describing the experiment.

During the ceremony, developers take extreme measures to ensure that malicious players can not compromise the code during the process – the reason, in this case, for theft of the aircraft. In addition, to ensure that the radioactive source was producing truly random impulses, Pierce and Miller attached a battery to their data collector for comparison.

These measures also extend to the destruction of all the computers used to build the code – or at least the parts of the software that the developers use for the process.

The result is, in theory, a piece of completely random private code, with which to build zcash.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which owns an interest in Zcash Company, the for-profit entity that develops the zcash protocol .

Image of Chernobyl via Shutterstock

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