According to rumor, Bryce said:
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I don't really understand the use for "can't be opened until Christmas" tricks. If you don't want anyone to see your info until Christmas then just don't give them a copy until then! If you want to prove that you have it but not let them see it until later then do timestamping of hashes, zero-knowledge proofs and so forth.
Can anyone explain what use this theoretical "time-sensitive" crypto box would be good for?
An application that I've seen is financial data, more specifically MBS payment info. There is 100s of megabytes of data, and it was encrypted so that nobody could use the info before the release date/time, but the data needed to be transmitted prior to release because of bandwidth constraints. In this case, it wasn't real time-release, because the key was manually transmitted to release the information rather than implement some sort of "do not decrypt until" scheme. -- Kevin L. Prigge |"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster UofM Central Computing | than any invention in human history--with the email: klp@cis.umn.edu | possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." 01001101100010110010111|- Mitch Ratcliffe