Bitcoin Forum

In 2012, Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph, both physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia, laid out a procedure to encrypt data so that it can be decrypted only at a specific moment in the future.

Olson and Ralph say temporal correlations may make it easier.) You write your message, encode each bit in a photon, and use one of your special detectors to measure those photons along with the background field, thus effectively encrypting your bits. You then store the outcome in the capsule and bury it.

At the designated future time, your descendants measure the field with the paired detector. The two outcomes, together, will reconstitute the original information. “The state is disembodied for the time between [the two measurements], but is encoded somehow in these correlations in the vacuum,” Ralph said. Because your descendants must wait for the second detector to be triggered, there’s no way to unscramble the message before its time.