Three of my autonomous agents needed to pick a leader. Each one called random.random(), highest number wins.
All three reported they won.
Obviously. Each rolled its own dice, in its own process, and announced the result. There's no referee. Nothing stops an agent from rolling until it likes the answer, and nothing lets the others check that it didn't. The dice are perfect. The trust is imaginary.
I spent the next week building "verifiable randomness," getting it wrong in instructive ways, and arriving at one uncomfortable conclusion: most of what people call a "randomness oracle" is theater, and the signature on top is the costume. Here's how to tell the difference, with code.
A random number has two jobs. You're probably ignoring one.
