It's not really a consensus mechanism either really - the randomness in some sense is deterministic, it just requires participation. I'm unsure which 'classic ways' you're referring to - in principle it's not that different to having a notary, except the notary is a distributed network rather than a single entity.

> The README was edited after the HN posts.

You can see from that the tlock git history the README.md hasn't been updated in 13 days and the tlock-js one hasn't been updated in 4 days - both before the HN post. Are you talking about another README?