The world of cryptocurrencies has only reached as far as it is today because of the large scale update architecture built into the soul of the industry. Engineers and developers have taken it upon themselves to ensure the longevity of the virtual asset ecosystem by bringing in new and improved methods of key generation.
Ripple, the cryptocurrency company led by Brad Garlinghouse, has been at the forefront of many innovations with the sole purpose of taking the nascent industry into the mainstream realm. Keeping in line with this, the engineers at the organization have been trying to dabble in some new tricks: generating cryptocurrency addresses with the help of microcontrollers and radioactive decay.
The concept of generating random numbers from radioactive decay was an older experiment but that did not mean it had been used in connection with the cryptocurrency industry. According to the engineers at Ripple, the way to sustain a stream of random numbers was to measure the time between 2 successive Geiger Counter click events with as much precision as we can.
The microprocessor install was conducted on an Arduino workspace which printed a JSON payload. The entire setup was meant to be as good or sometimes even better than built-in tools. Ripple’s blogpost stated:
“But researchers are always poking holes in real-world implementations of theories and proving them less secure than intended. For those reasons we can’t recommend you use this as a method for generating wallet addresses for storing any significant amount of any cryptocurrency.”
The experiment took about forty minutes to generate a completely random cryptocurrency address, which was not something that could be used in real-world applications. Ripple engineers added that the location of the experiment also played a big role in generating the required counts per minute. External stimuli are a major factor to be considered with some scientists claiming that a practical solution can be created if more research is conducted.
For the time being, address generation using radiation is still in its nascent stages but that does not mean it cannot have future implications. As an industry that came to life just over a decade ago, the rate of growth has been more than any other industry in the history of humanity.