"In decentralized systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum, when a user loses their secret key, they lose their entire account. Existing methods of account recovery eit

"In decentralized systems like Bitcoin or Ethereum, when a user loses their secret key, they lose their entire account. Existing methods of account recovery either give up decentralization or require persistence of information by the user. Instead, this paper introduces Escrovery, a method of account recovery in trustless systems that is decentralized, non-persistent, anonymous, and secure. Escrovery uses 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." Ouch. End up in prison for wire fraud, lose all your BTC in the process cause you can't respond to the challenge. And you only figure it out years later after you got free from prison. It might be vulnerable to (other) forms of (D)DoS as well. Let us assume the owner of the BTC deceased and took their secret key with them to the grave. Who'd be the rightful owner of the BTC? I'd say the family (who exactly and how much differs per jurisdiction!). So if you want to assure that is possible, all you need is e.g. a notary or apply shamir's secret sharing with multiple family members (arguably a poor man's notary though it has its own advantages and disadvantages e.g. a notary can conspire against you but so can family members; for a notary there's much more at stake I suppose given its their profession and credibility at stake). These solutions are less complex, and rely on your own responsibility to implement correctly. Which, to be fair, also has its pros and cons.