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I recently came across the tag, which seems to be used pretty haphazardly across a bunch of questions dealing with various aspects of time-related cryptography (e.g. time-lock puzzles, cryptoperiods, secure time synchronization), presumably because it happens to be one of the few tags we have with "time" in its name and because it looked generic enough and had no tag wiki.

I just added a quick tag wiki summary for it, essentially codifying the existing haphazard usage pattern, but I'm not really happy about that, so I'd like a second opinion on what to do with it:

  1. Leave the scope broad, rename the tag to just to reflect the scope.

  2. Remove it from everything but questions dealing with time-lock puzzles (and maybe long-term encryption / cryptoperiods), edit tag wiki to reflect narrowed scope. May need some new tags to replace it on the edited questions.

  3. Meh, it's good enough like this, just leave it as it is.

Also, what about the other existing tag with "time" (not prefixed with "one-") in its name, ? It too needs a tag wiki. Should these two tags have non-overlapping scopes, or should one perhaps subsume the other?

Edit: Since the consensus seems to be to split / eliminate the tag, let me list the questions currently tagged with it and try to figure out how they should be tagged:

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    $\begingroup$ I personally think #2 is the best option. $\endgroup$
    – Reid
    Commented Aug 11, 2013 at 15:42
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    $\begingroup$ Thinking more about this issue, I think you're dead-on in your comments. I agree with the recommendation to replace time-sensitive with proof-of-work for questions 1 and 2, since that's the gist of those two. Further, the "cryptoperiod" question is sort of an odd one, and I think removing time-sensitive but leaving standards is a good idea (after all, a "cryptoperiod" is pretty much a standards-related thing entirely, especially if the NIST was the entity who defined it ...). [...] $\endgroup$
    – Reid
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 12:53
  • $\begingroup$ [...] The timestamping tag is a bit trickier. I agree the first question you presented should be tagged with it, but I'm not sure the second fits. We could perhaps shoehorn it into timestamping, yes, but I don't think that works well. Not sure what to do there. The next question ("time-locked") is another question that is unique enough that I'm not sure we can find a good tag for it, and the last question is similar in nature (in my opinion). I guess my question is, what do we do with (good) questions that have unique subject matter, unlikely to be repeated? $\endgroup$
    – Reid
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 12:56

2 Answers 2

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Here's my proposal how to re-tag the questions you listed. In each case, replace the tag with....

In all cases, the existing other tags should be left in place.

At least, that's my proposal.

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  • $\begingroup$ ...aaand it's done. I ended up creating the timed-release tag (which currently lacks a proper tag wiki, it only has an excerpt) and mostly followed the suggestions here. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Sep 3, 2013 at 15:25
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I think is a poor choice for a tag name. It is not descriptive: it's not clear what it would refer to. To me, "time-sensitive" makes me think of something that is urgent or has a short deadline.

I suggest removing from everything. Let's kill it.

We can use for timestamping-related questions. For other questions, either we go without a special tag -- or we invent one that is more suitable. But for now, deleting seems like the right first step. I don't feel a burning need to have a specific replacement in every case before deleting , given that we're only talking about a few questions.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you're right, "time-sensitive" is a bad tag name anyway. I've listed the seven questions currently tagged with it above, along with some ideas on what to do with them. If nobody has any better ideas, I think I'll start retagging them gradually, probably starting with the ones that should just be moved under timestamping. $\endgroup$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Aug 13, 2013 at 8:53

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