[bialpio]

This feels like Shamir's secret sharing with a pinky promise that "we won't decrypt things earlier", am I missing something?

[aarreedd]

Yes, essentially. However, the 'pinky-promisers' are large, well-funded, geographically distributed organizations that have strong incentives, both in terms of reputation and operations, to keep their promise

[bialpio]

Gotcha, at first I was expecting something that tried to rely on some kind of physical limitation or a property that the passage of time has.