A Lower Bound for Adaptively-Secure Collective Coin Flipping Protocols

In 1985, Ben-Or and Linial (Advances in Computing Research 1989) introduced the collective coin flipping problem, where n parties communicate via a single broadcast channel and wish to generate a common random bit in the presence of adaptive Byzantine corruptions. In this model, the adversary can decide to corrupt a party in the course of the protocol as a function of the messages seen so far. They showed that the majority protocol, in which each player sends a random bit and the output is the majority value, tolerates O(√n) adaptive corruptions. They conjectured that this is optimal for such adversaries.