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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure. If you wanted to be deliberate, you'd choose a plausible value that you could control.

No one is going to suspect `98761316832165974216498789746` is anything other than random. But `000000000000000123` looks suspicious.

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But that would be obviously intentional. Much more plausible deniability with 0x4.

Why are many of them, suspicious?

By random chance you probably wouldn't get that many zeros. Of course, one could say it's just as random as any other string, but..

Not a mathematician, but I'm sure the probability of them all being below 384 is going to be in the order of 0.000000001% if not less :)

10 times the amount of digits is the possible number space.

smaller than 384 means 384 numbers (including 0) divided by the amount of possible numbers (see above) imho

It's a 384-bit curve, so between 0 and 2^384 which has about 115 decimal digits.

Sure, if they were actually sampling 384 bits. Sounds like they sampled a lot less than that; maybe someone though "384 bits" meant "in the range [0, 383]" or whatever.

The probability of getting a 0 is the same for every digit. However, in my opinion, the probability of getting a number that starts with two zeros is 1/10 * 1/10, and the probability of getting a number that starts with the same two digits is 10 * 1/10 * 1/10.

But the probability to receive one number or the other are the same.

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