that makes it start to sound practical. but consider: this scheme is designed for insider trading. it is a conspiracy! the number of participants must be kept small to avoid detection, and for trading on information from the far future, they need to be committed for a long time.

the television licensing enforcers have it easy: they want very little information (yes or no), on a very short timespan (weeks), and since they have have had the actual meaning of their actions concealed from them, they can be employed in large numbers without problems.

suppose you want to convey a large message, with enough information needed to, say, save old doctor who episodes from being destroyed, so they can be found in the future. a message needs hundreds of bits, coveyed over many decades. you need a huge and long-lasting conspiracy.

well, the original insider trading conspiracy of old british men who worked in r&d was not large enough for this. it was a handful of people, in it for life for the fun of it. with regular meetings over a few decades, they could convey only a few bits of information back in time.

but, they had just enough bits that they could retroactively bootstrap a larger conspiracy if necessary. you don't need a lot of bits to do insider trades. if you can make a successful trade, you can hire more people for your conspiracy, and now you have more bits. virtuous cycle

the only problem with this scheme is now you have to maintain a multi-decade insider trading conspiracy with exponential growth in membership over time.

so, finally, what happened in 2006? well, you can probably guess at this point what occurred in many essentially identical 2006es: the tiny conspiracy of old men tried to use their half-century-long chain of side-channels to reach back a few decades and prevent media being lost.

but we don't live in a timeline where they succeeded, because… well, co-ordination problems are hard?

there could be a timeline where they do succeed, but i think a conspiracy of (at least) hundreds maintaining a causality loop of decades is just too big.

ok i'm done