Tell HN: I came up with an interesting way to do decentralized account recovery

Thought I'd share this with the HN community.

Link to the Escrovery paper: https://github.com/pickhardt/escrovery/blob/master/escrovery...

I came up with an interesting way to do totally decentralized account recovery. Why might this be useful? Suppose you have some account on Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc and you lose your secret key. Worse, you also lose (or never had) any way to recover it.

Escrovery gives you a way to recover it, and without simply using a centralized service like Coinbase or needing secret shares from k of n friends. This could also be used as a recovery method with self-sovereign identities.

The way it works it using escrowed payments to deter malicious recovery attempts. Any user may make an Escrovery challenge to recover any account by first placing an amount of money in escrow. If the original account owner responds to the challenge in a certain amount of time, they earn the escrow. Otherwise, the challenger takes ownership of the account and recovers their escrow.

The main limitation is that it requires users to be regularly active in checking for challenges to their account. For some use cases, this would be fine. For others, perhaps it wouldn't work.