pf80 on Nostr: I am considering building a service for sharing time locked messages and would be ...

I am considering building a service for sharing time locked messages and would be curious to hear your thoughts and recommendations.

My main motivation is that I would need something like this for myself, but could not find the right tool for my needs (please point me to any similar service you may know, I have certainly missed some).

The goal is to provide a user friendly (non-tech savvy) way to transmit and to claim a message after a given date or after a certain period of inactivity by the message sender. Could be used for inheritance planning obviously, but it would not have any legal authority.

I know the concept of timelock exists in Bitcoin, and also services like Casa or Nunchuk provide inheritance planning capabilities. But I am after something possibly simpler to transmit possibly less sensitive data/information. It would be used to transmit text, with whatever message you want. This doesn't mean security should not be a concern, so here are some of my thoughts at this stage, to possibly build something practical and secure enough:

* The service is a third-party that will store the encrypted message, i.e. you rely on the third party to retrieve the message or be notified when unlocked, but that third-party never knows the content of the message (i.e. encryption/decryption on the client side)
* Open source project so anyone can review the code (and for example validate that unencrypted message are indeed never sent to the third-party)
* Different workflows can be imagined, e.g. unlock message after a given date or unlock message after a certain period of inactivity by the author
* The message recipient is expected to have the key to decrypt the message the day it becomes available
* The message author can cancel the message with his key or with his email address (e.g. in case he lost the private key, he can still cancel the message but cannot view it)

I imagine pretty much anyone on Nostr will rightly say that relying on a third-party is not ideal, but it seems to me that it is acceptable in this case, mainly because the the third-party actually never sees the unencrypted message.

Anyway, I am curious to collect some thoughts about this. Thank you in advance for your feedback.

#timelock #inhertiance