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Re:Timelock Encryption made possible and easy to use by layer8 on Monday August 15, 2022 @09:14PM (#32478050)
So, effectively this encrypts a message for a public key whose corresponding private-key owner promises to only decrypt it after the specified time. Except that the owner here is a distributed network, so the promise can only be broken by a majority of the network.

The main assumption here is that said network will still be operational, publicly accessible and non-compromised at decryption time.

Re:Timelock Encryption made possible and easy to use by anomalroil on Tuesday August 16, 2022 @02:44AM (#32479870)
Yeah, I guess that's a fair way of describing threshold cryptography and a threshold network. There was actually already once a proposal of creating a "timelapse encryption service", by Rabin in 2006 (https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/26506434) they said they were planning on implementing and deploying such a service, but it never made it AFAIK. The main difference here is that it's relying on an existing service providing also something else, namely public randomness, and that this service has been running for 2 years and never had any disruption so far.

In any case another assumption is that there are no quantum computers able to break your ciphertext since every primitive used here is broken by quantum computers. So it would be ill-advised to use it to encrypt something that cannot be decrypted until 10, 20 or 50 years, since it might well be broken by then if even if the network survived. But for near-future things, it works well.