I did 1200 dice rolls to check for bias in ordinary board game dice

Result: there is no detected bias, and regular dice can easily and quickly be used to generate good randomness

I saw some FUD that you need special casino dice, and you have to roll them in some special way, and it's easy to get it wrong, and the surface needs to be completely flat, float the dice in water to check they're balanced, etc etc loads of FUD reasons why dice rolling won't work. So I checked myself in the spirit of don't trust verify.

I found three dice lying around my house in some old board games. I rolled them inside a plastic cup that I'd shake for a second or two, then put the cup down bottom-up. The dice bounce off the walls of the cup and each other many times, which creates huge unpredictability.

I originally was only meaning to do this for 200 rolls, but then became hyperfocused and just kept going. This data is brought to you by weaponized autism.

Rolling 50 dice this way only took me 2-3 minutes, and it would be even faster if I had more dice.

Now in any sample there will be some variation just by chance. We can understand that boundary with math. The binomial distribution describes these dice rolls. The standard deviation of the binomial distribution is sqrt(N p (1-p)) where p is probability (1/6 in this case) and N is number of trials (1200 in this case). Put the numbers in the formula, work out the percentage and you get a standard deviation of 1.08%, which means there's a 63% chance that those percentages in my graph will deviate by that much (and therefore 37% that the deviation will be outside that range just by chance). Since my graph values are within that range there was no bias detected. I worked out that to detect bias down to 0.1% I would need to roll 138888 time and I'm not going to roll that much. The percentage standard deviation goes as 1/sqrtN so it only improves slowly as you do more rolls.

I was not affected by the recent coldcard hack and I've never owned that wallet, but it's interesting and important to check and improve.

I think the biggest thing people can do is multi-software multisig. This is easy to do as many bitcoin wallets have multisig like electrum and sparrow. You just click buttons in the UI and don't need to do any math. Multisig security is additive. It removes a single point of failure. If coldcard users had made a 2-of-2 multisig with the most malware-ridden online desktop computer you've ever seen, then it will still be better security than coldcard alone, and they would still have their bitcoins today because the online desktop would have to be hacked separately which is unlikely.

I've seen a big misunderstanding that most important thing is good randomness for seed generation, so people are thinking of using radioactive decay or something. It's not, the most important thing for seed generation is having a secret number that nobody else knows. Dice are perfect for this because they can be understood by anyone, and they can be used offline and behind closed doors.