Weakly secret bit commitment: applications to lotteries and fair exchange

The paper presents applications for the weak protection of secrets in which weakness is not just acceptable but desirable. For one application, two versions of a lottery scheme are presented in which the result of the lottery is determined by the ticket numbers purchased, but no one can control the outcome or determine what it is until after the lottery closes. This is because the outcome is kept secret in a way that is breakable after a predictable amount of time and/or computation. Another presented application is a variant on fair exchange protocols that requires no trusted third party at all