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Comment by Jamustico | Hacker News Reader

Whats the point of this if it's not decentralized/algorithmic based.

Who knows if this service will go down or something?

Might aswell just do this with one entity m

There is no decentralized algorithm for timelock encryption. No such scheme exists. Distributed is the best you're going to get without a radical breakthrough, and that's exactly what TFA is.

Why ? If you wrap the message into multiple layers of encryption (TOR style) that needs to go into multiple nodes, and if alongside the next encrypted layer you have a date the nodes agrees to wait to pass the message to another node, that would work, no ?

Even with some corrupted nodes, the message would still be secret, the only issue would be if the last nodes are corrupted : your message would be distributed too soon. But with enough layers and enough nodes to go through, you could mitigate this risk.

The network could even detect corrupted nodes if other nodes received the message too soon.

What stops you from just spinning up X nodes in your own private network if everything is open source? And then tell every node to decrypt instantly.

Because each node generates its own key pair and when encrypting a message you choose a random route and you use the keys of the nodes of your route to encrypt each layer.

What the person you're replying to is talking about is a Sybil attack. You pick random nodes, yes, but what if the list of nodes to pick randomly from is 99.5% the attacker? This is a real world attack that has been used against Tor, for example.

Thank you, I understand !

So you can only decrypt the message if all the same nodes are still up? If anyone goes down you cant decrypt?

Yes.

However, you could mitigate this by calculating hundreds of routes.

But yes, you are right, that was just an interesting thought experiment before going to bed, I wasn't trying to revolutionize timelock encryption ;)

This is not true at all.

If you have a protocol, there's plenty of cryptography conferences and prestigious journals that would accept your manuscript.

Would love to know how

HTLC would do the same in a distributed and trustless fashion and yet it's important to know League of Entropy is a bunch of distributed crypto organizations like Chainsafe or the Ethereum Foundation.

I assume you mean a verifiable compute function rather than hash time-lock contract, as the latter can't be used for encryption. But that's not really a timelock either: it only sets a lower bound on the amount of compute required. But "compute" here is abstract, and when the conversion from "required hashes" to "time elapsed" can vary by 6-10 orders of magnitude, it stops having any appreciable meaning.

EPFL, DEDIS, university of Chile, University College London and cloudflare aren’t crypto organisations

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