The “resetable” aspect seems to be a crucial part of true “time-lock” encryption… rather than what feels like a “proof of work” mode where an amount of computation stands in as a proxy for “time elapsed”. But regardless of how good a proxy it is, “time-elapsed” is not really what we want - we don’t want a lock that takes “at least n seconds of effort to open”, we want a lock that will not open before a timestamp.

It feels like a true time-lock solution should be impossible to unlock before a particular date, but trivial afterwards, rather than assuming the opener started work on it at the moment it was released and has been burning cycles at some maximal rate since then.

I don’t think the universe contains unfakeable timestamps, which seem to be a requirement for that true solution - it feels like it’s not compatible with relativity, so maybe proxies are the best we can do on a fundamental level.