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Comment by ta988 | Hacker News Reader

Having an escrow in a structure like the library of congress (or the NSA, they have tons of storage /s) and they get released when company dies or the product isn't commercialised for more than x years. Or when the company decides to.

Maybe it is a bit more complicated with assets rights, that's what a couple game devs told me.

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Dan Geer (CISO at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s private investment arm) gave a BlackHat talk that advocated for this, among other things.

https://youtube.com/watch?si=8txvgqH6mqerinkZ&v=nT-TGvYOBpI&...

Something about the CIA and NSA having access to a large library of commercial source code makes me feel uneasy from a privacy perspective. It's like inviting the neighborhood robbers over for dinner.

I wonder if there's a way to implement this without storing the code with a central authority, e.g. by encrypting the code so that it can only be decrypted in X years. You'd probably still have to have a central authority involved to ensure people can't just fast-forward - but a system similar to TOTP codes could be a neat mechanism!

I don't think we have any way to do that. Time is abstract for algorithms. Unless you make something you know you couldn't solve in less than x years. But that assumes you can predict improvements in algorithms and computing power over a long period which could be tricky to get precisely.

You use reflective solar bodies X/2 light years away and blast them with highly redundant encrypted data such that in X years Earth will be on the receiving end of the reflected transmission.

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