<pre>
  PIP: PIP-0012
  Title: Change account recovery to 10 years
  Type: Protocol
  Impact: Hard-Fork
  Author: Herman Schoenfeld <i>&lt;herman@sphere10.com&gt;</i>
  Comments-URI: https://discord.gg/sJqcgtD  (channel #pip-0012)
  Status: Proposed
  Created: 2018-01-03
</pre>

## Summary

It is proposed that the RECOVER operation be changed from 4 years to 10 and to include the account itself in the recovery.

## Motivation

Coinrot is a serious economic issue afflicting almost all other cryptocurrencies. Coinrot is the phenomenon of coins being permanently lost due to lost/corrupted keys and/or natural death. It is estimated that 20% of Bitcoins have already rotted. PascalCoin solves this problem by allowing PASC to be transferred from an account, without owners signature, after an inactivity period of 4 years. Whilst this is a good start, it does not solve the problem of PASA-rot, which is a far more limited (and important) resource than PASC. Also, community has expressed discomfort with the 4 year period, pointing out long-term savers could be seriously afflicted.

## Specification

The proposal here is to simply to change RECOVER operation inactivity period from 4 years to 10 **and** to simply update the key of the recovered account rather than transferring it's balance. This allows both the PASA and PASC to be recovered in a single operation, with minimal code changes.

### Definitions 

let RecoverOperation denote the recovery operation.

let RecoverOperation.InactiveAccount denote the account being recovered

let RecoverOperation.NewOwnerAccount denote the destination account to transfer the recovered PASC to.

### Current Algorithm

1. Verify RecoverOperation in similar way to TRANSACTION operations
2. Verify ( SafeBox.LastBlockNumber - SafeBox.Accounts[ RecoverOperation.InactiveAccount].LastUpdatedBlock ) >= 420480
3. Transfer balance from RecoverOperation.InactiveAccount to RecoverOperation.NewOwnerAccount

### Proposed Algorithm

let RecoverOperation.NewOwnerKey denote the new owners account key.

1. Verify RecoverOperation in similar manner to CHANGE KEY operation
2. Verify ( SafeBox.LastBlockNumber - SafeBox.Accounts[ RecoverOperation.InactiveAccount ].LastUpdatedBlock ) >= 1051200 
3. Change key of InactiveAccount to RecoverOperation.NewOwnerKey


## Rationale

Other approaches were considered such as allowing partial recovery of funds every sub-period. For example, allowing 10% of the balance to be recovered every 2 weeks, after 4 years of inactivity. All such approaches were significantly more complicated and required much more development, which adds hard-fork risk (especially when combined with other PIPs in V3 release). As a result, the simplest most elegant solution was chosen.

## Backwards Compatibility

This proposal is not backwards compatible and requires a hard-fork activation. However, since PascalCoin has not been around for 4 years, the old RECOVER algorithm can safely be discarded from the protocol.