Re:Timelock Encryption made possible and easy to use
by cassonmars on Monday August 15, 2022 @11:51PM
(#32479012)
That can possibly work, however it has a significantly greater variability in deployment environments compared to traditional time lock puzzles due to it being trivially optimized by hardware (depending on the hash algorithm chosen). It unfortunately does not work at all as a VDF though, as the proof requires the entire chain of hashes and is not succinct enough to be used on commodity hardware.
You use a GPU to do N parallel chains of M length. You then encrypt the seeds for the chains using the previous chain’s ending value as the key for the seed.
The seed of the first chain is your starting point; the ending of the last chain encrypts your key.
Anyone seeking to “unlock” that key must do the hashing sequentially — meaning that you can use a cluster to get ratios like 1,000,000:1 between generation and unlocking.
For reference, there’s around 500,000 minutes in a year.