Time-lock Puzzles and Timed-release Crypto

Abstract

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):