Thought I'd share this with the Bitcoin Talk community. 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, plus you forgot any way to recover it. This gives you a way to recover it, and without simply using a centralized service or needing secret shares from k of n friends. It could also be used as a recovery method with self-sovereign identities.
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.
Here is the full paper:
https://github.com/pickhardt/escrovery/blob/master/escrovery.pdfFeel free to get in touch if you're interested in using it.
