

Introducing the timechain – a DAC based on time-lock encryption - Uptrenda
http://roberts.pm/timechain

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hliyan
Barring burst growth in _serial_ computing power (the way I understand, a
time-lock cannot be broken faster by throwing more parallel cores at it), I
think this will work great!

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gwern
One of the nice things about my hash time-lock construction is that besides
the general slowdown of serial computing power growth, speeding up SHA-256 has
been _intensively_ incentivized by Bitcoin mining over the past 6 years in
addition to crypto research interest in faster primitives; so it seems like
one could have very high confidence that there will be no new breakthroughs in
optimizing SHA-256 over the next few years.

(What's more concerning is questions about whether anyone would bother
investing the computing power to unlock the crypto, since while it's bad if a
time-lock can be opened early, it's also probably not good if it opens years
late. For example, the original successive-squaring timelocks released back in
the '90s are not going to open anywhere remotely on time because they didn't
foresee the serial slowdown happening when it did and because I don't think
anyone is trying to open them at all.)

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amluto
I'm surprised there was no mention of Rivest's time-lock puzzles. They're a
simple construction for time-lock puzzles that can be generated much more
quickly than they can be solved.

