I'd argue that Wikileaks doesn't want it released solely on his death but more like 'Assange's assassination or 10 years, whichever comes first', so it does get released eventually.
And I'm surprised no one sees a use-case in recent events: if I were DPR, I'd be happy if usable time-lock crypto existed so I could, say, lock a wallet of 100k btc for 10 years, and give it to a friend as a backup; I don't have to worry about the friend deciding that they'd like to retire to Patagonia, but if I'm 'shot resisting arrest', at least I left my friend a fortune. Or, even if he hands a time-locked wallet over to the FBI, he's delayed them spending it for 10 years and given the Bitcoin economy that much more time to grow and be able to absorb a sudden infusion of 1% of the money supply.
As it is, he's basically in an all-or-nothing position.
Every transaction can have a lock time associated with it. This allows the transaction to be pending and replaceable until an agreed-upon future time, specified either as a block index or as a timestamp (the same field is used for both, but values less than 500 million are interpreted as a block index). If a transaction's lock time has been reached, we say it is final.
Yes, the specific case of a fallback is possible, but not the general time-lock case. I think. I was discussing this a little with the Bitcoin developer mentioned there, Mike Hearn, but I quickly got out of my depth and the conversation petered out.
And I'm surprised no one sees a use-case in recent events: if I were DPR, I'd be happy if usable time-lock crypto existed so I could, say, lock a wallet of 100k btc for 10 years, and give it to a friend as a backup; I don't have to worry about the friend deciding that they'd like to retire to Patagonia, but if I'm 'shot resisting arrest', at least I left my friend a fortune. Or, even if he hands a time-locked wallet over to the FBI, he's delayed them spending it for 10 years and given the Bitcoin economy that much more time to grow and be able to absorb a sudden infusion of 1% of the money supply.
As it is, he's basically in an all-or-nothing position.