RandomPick

Flip a coin

One tap, a genuine even chance, and a running tally so you can watch how streaky fair really looks.

Fairer than an actual coin

A physical coin is not a perfect randomiser. Its mass is not evenly distributed, which introduces a small bias, and the way it is caught matters — research on coin flipping has found a measurable tendency to land the same way up as it started when caught in the hand. Spinning a coin on a table is worse again, sometimes substantially so.

A cryptographic random bit has none of those physical asymmetries. What it lacks is the thing that makes a real coin useful in an argument: everybody can watch a real coin.

Fair looks streaky

The tally is here because the most common misunderstanding about randomness is what it should look like. Over a hundred fair flips, a run of six or more identical results is more likely than not. People asked to invent a "random-looking" sequence alternate far too much, and a coin flipper that felt right to that intuition would have to be rigged.

Watch the tally over fifty flips. It wanders, and it converges on even far more slowly than expected — the absolute gap between heads and tails tends to grow even as the ratio settles toward one.

Questions

Is it a genuine 50/50?
Yes. It draws a single random bit from the browser's cryptographic source, with no weighting and no memory of previous flips. A real coin, incidentally, is slightly less fair than this — physical coins have a small bias from their mass distribution and from the way people catch them, and a spun coin can be meaningfully biased.
Why does it not alternate more?
Because genuine randomness looks streakier than people expect. In a hundred fair flips you are more likely than not to see a run of six or more of the same result. A sequence that alternated neatly would be evidence of something wrong. The tally is shown so you can watch it converge slowly rather than tidily.
Does the tally reset?
On reload, yes — it counts the current session only. That is deliberate: a persistent lifetime counter invites reading meaning into a number that has none.
Can I use it to settle something?
For deciding who makes the tea, certainly. For anything where money changes hands, use a method both parties can watch and verify — the value of a coin flip in a dispute is that everyone sees it happen, and a result on one person's screen does not have that property.