[denton-scratch]

So Cloudflare suggests there are two ways of doing timelock encryption: you can rely on some proxy for the passage of time, such as repeated hashing; or you can rely on one or more trusted agents.

I don't think the 'proxy' approach is timelock encryption, because it doesn't actually rely on the passage of time. Cloudflare is relying on a network of trusted agents that 'tick' at a predictable rate.

I think I wouldn't want to rely on this network of trusted agents to preserve a long-lived secret. There's no guarantee that the network will still exist when it's time to reveal thw secret.

Is there a way to do timelock encryption that doesn't involve reliance on a third-party, and that really depends on the actual time, rather than on a proxy for time? I cn't see it, but I'm not very clever.

[kaangiray26]

It's funny just thinking about it. Because if you are not depending on a third-party, then you are depending on yourself only. Which means that once you encrypt something hoping that you won't be able to decrypt for some amount of time, you accept that changing of the time has something to do with the decryption of your encrypted message. Since you can certainly know how much of time should be pass, you can't keep secrets from yourself right?

So, in a sense, in my opinion, if you want to encrypt a message and send it to someone and make it timelocked without a third-party, you might as well just keep the message secret until the desired amount of time has passed and just give it to him.

[denton-scratch]

Well, the use-case I have in mind is that I want to convey a message to (say) my granddaughter, on or after her 21st birthday. I'll be long-gone.

There's no point in encrypting a secret to protect it from my own eyes; I already know the secret.