One thing that bothers me sometimes is the fact that every account here is permanently owned by a single set of keys, even when there are no longer any reference to the private signing keys to make use of an account's resources. Many things might cause this to happen and two of them are the permanent loss of all keys by the account's owner and/or the death of the account's owner.

For that reason I had a few thoughts regarding the so-called dead accounts and what could be done to them.

Most people might think that it's the best just to leave them alone, but what bother's me is the allocation of registry resources to accounts that are probably never to be active again. For that reason, I considered a few possibilities:

To avoid stillborn accounts.

• Every account created should have a 28-day deadline limit to sign anything with any key before its creation be undone and have it's username available again for newer accounts to be created.
  • Any transaction with any key just to prove that the creator didn't simply lost the key when creating the account, leaving an account that will never be used for anything or by anyone.
  • All balances in the stillborn account can be burned of remain in limbo for a future user to reclaim when creating an account with the same name. I personally prefer to have them burn.
  • Signing a vote, transfer, a custom json or literally anything with any key in the account's first 28 days would be enough to disable said trigger.

About accounts that were abandoned or belong to dead people.

• Accounts would be considered alive when ANY activity signed by said account is registered in the last 5 years. I personally dislike considering passive activity(receiving votes, transactions or being mentioned by other accounts) as a proof-of-live but some might disagree.
  • Accounts who signed no transaction since the Hive Hardfork(March/2020) could also be considered dead as they probably never left Steem.

How to avoid having your account legally dead?

• Just sign and broadcast ANY transaction, even an empty custom_json or a 0.1% upvote of a very old post in an interval of less than 5 years.

What to do with dead accounts then?

• Easier to implement possibility(although I dislike a lot this one):
  • Burn everything related to said account(including balances) and allow to, in the future, a new user to create a new account with the same name. All references to the previous homonym account would only be accessible by navigating through old blocks.
• Easiest solution:
  • Do nothing to accounts. Just ignore them.
• More complex solution:
  • Block all future passive transactions(received from other accounts) to said account.
    • Can't transfer or delegate any Hive, HP or HBD to said account.
    • Can't upvote/downvote posts from said account.
  • All transactions will reference a new account once username is reused.
  • Make said account inaccessible from the default API calls. A new API would have to be created to deal with this.
    • New API will be able to list balances, posts and history of dead account using it's numeric ID as reference instead of account's name.
      • Other possibility is to use account's name AND numeric ID or intermediate block ID from when account was still alive.
    • New API will be able to withdraw savings or to transfer balances to another account. All Hive Power should start to power down automatically upon account's death as there is no use for it when account can no longer influence the network out of being just a set of balances to be transfer out.
    • Account's death could be reversible while no new account is created with the same name by just signing a proof-of-life transaction in new API. Once a new homonym account is created, the old one is dead forever.
    • New API will have methods to list statistics and balances in dead accounts that will not be included in other APIs as they are deemed spoils.

Feel free to disagree with anything I posted. It was just a suggestion I thought lately.