[Cryptography] Came up with a weird use case, got questions

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

So... about the incentive to break a key...

Let us imagine that we got millions of people to take cat pictures and
escrow them. Then there would be an incentive to break the key.

Problem is that it is impossible to predict how fact hash mining will be in
five years let alone 100 so those schemes fail. People really like cat
pictures.

The rocket solutions are in effect merely a different type of clock. And
the physics of those are really hard because electronics degrade in space
and things burn up in the atmosphere.

The most robust schemes in practice are going to involve ceremony and some
form of trusted hardware. We could build a HSM such that it will only
release the data if it receives a signed statement of the current time from
a trusted source. Throw it in a vault and bring it out after 100 years. It
will probably work. If built right.

Establishing a quorate notary that can be trusted to sign time is rather
easier. Each notary would have to delegate its function to a successor
periodically but that should not be too difficult to ensure.

Of course there is then a real risk that the data is lost because the
notaries don't continue their function.
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