Time-lock Puzzles and Timed-release Crypto
Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Dariusz Wagner · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 1996
1 Introduction Our motivation is the notion of "timed-release crypto, " where the goal is to encrypt a message so that it can not be decrypted by anyone, not even the sender, until a pre-determined amount of time has passed. The goal is to "send information into the future. " This problem was first discussed by Timothy May [6]. What are the applications of "timed-release crypto"? Here are a few possibilities (some due to May):