Distributed coin tossing

This paper presents algorithms for distributed coin tossing. Distributed coin tossing furnishes a symmetrical way to break the symmetry in a distributed system. They allow the conflicts arising from competing remote sites to be overcome in a fair (equiprobable) manner: any site has an equal chance of being selected. It as also shown how these algorithms may be used to obtain a total order between competing sites of a system. Moreover, in each case the outputs of our algorithms are totally unpredictable.<
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