A Fully Decentralized Time-Lock Encryption System on Blockchain

Abstract

To make a time capsule on the Internet, which will be opened at a planned time in the future, without third parties' involvement has always been a difficult problem. Although there are many researches worked on various time-lock systems, they may have some shortcomings like uncertainty in decryption time, not fully decentralized, hard to estimate the required computing resources. In this paper, we proposed a protocol and a reliable encryption scheme to make time-sensitive message be opened on time at a fully decentralized environment, which is then integrated with the blockchain to adapt to different computing power situations. The method also provides the capability of incorporating with appropriate incentives for encouraging participants to contribute their computing resources, which makes our system more suitable for real world applications.