timbeiko.eth
@tim
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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Cassie Heart
@cassie
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
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tg
@tg
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.
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tg
@tg
Reason: You ultimately make strong assumption bounds on what compute power DOESN'T exist, which tend not to be sufficiently-boundable for any small task - and instead only usefully-boundable for tasks so gigantic, e.g. to be sure that there's not 100x more compute power for the task lurking, e.g. Bitcoin ASIC mining.
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tg
@tg
And you could solve that if you gave up permissionlessness, but probably don't want to do that. It's a deep rabbit hole, but ultimately all of these timelock-crypto based paths lead to dead-ends, for anything but the largest task of securing the base chain itself. IMO.
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