I used the term blockchain with liberty, it is based on a consensus mechanism so you need to assume the consensus is right which is different of timelock encryption usage in classic ways. The README was edited after the HN posts.
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?