Is there a way to encrypt something on Ethereum and “force” decryption at a certain block? Idea is to sidestep not revealing the data. It’s fine if “as of block X, anyone can decrypt”, not just the original sender.

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Timelock cryptography. Not the timelock contract pattern that OpenZeppelin has but something like an RSA or IQC style timelock puzzle. It’d be just as decryptable off-chain as it would on-chain, but that would be the way to do it. You’d basically set the parameters such that it’s _roughly_ the right height, err h

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

Ah, now we're talking about the dual - forcing the operation to NOT be done until a certain amount of elapsed time.

FWIW, I'd consider that whatever time-related bounds proofs that timelock cryptography may provide - to be so fuzzy so as to be totally impractical for any practical applications I can think of.

Not necessarily — the speed constraint of IQC is in speed of the fastest linear processing, necessarily by design it cannot be parallelized like Bitcoin miners working in unison to “find the winning hash”, and while there exists ASICs for the Wesolowski VDF it can’t get much faster

Let’s say that proof has 3 basic states,
(1) proved true
(2) proved false
(3) neither proved true or false.

If there’s a type (1) proof of the claim that totally linear is the computation is the fastest possible  way, then I’d love to see it. Bet it’s a type (3) pretending to be a type (1).

It’s not that linear computation is the fastest way to calculate the timelock, it’s that the construction is such that it is the _only_ way to calculate the timelock, as the cyclical calculations performed are contingent on the evaluation of the prior.

The same could be said of a secret machine which could calculate hashes faster or somehow has a break in a given hash algo in a PoW model — all it has to do is wait just close enough to the block rate and “win”. As miner diversity still seems to be pretty well aligned to the distribution suggests that is not the 

Real question that — It there secretly faster hardware out there than you had assumed.
Violate that assumption bounds, and   all bets are off.
Suddenly the message that had to stay secret for 50 blocks, gets uncovered in 5 blocks.
Of course heretical to say, as all PoS platforms seem to hope this path will work out.