Yeah, I guess that's a fair way of describing threshold cryptography and a threshold network. There was actually already once a proposal of creating a "timelapse encryption service", by Rabin in 2006 (https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/26506434) they said they were planning on implementing and deploying such a service, but it never made it AFAIK.
The main difference here is that it's relying on an existing service providing also something else, namely public randomness, and that this service has been running for 2 years and never had any disruption so far.
In any case another assumption is that there are no quantum computers able to break your ciphertext since every primitive used here is broken by quantum computers. So it would be ill-advised to use it to encrypt something that cannot be decrypted until 10, 20 or 50 years, since it might well be broken by then if even if the network survived.
But for near-future things, it works well.
In any case another assumption is that there are no quantum computers able to break your ciphertext since every primitive used here is broken by quantum computers. So it would be ill-advised to use it to encrypt something that cannot be decrypted until 10, 20 or 50 years, since it might well be broken by then if even if the network survived. But for near-future things, it works well.