One of the points I made several times since 2019 when I first registered as witness it the fact that we have too many "dead witnesses" being called upon block production due to the fact they are not setting their deactivation key^[1] when stopped block production.

If you are a still active witness, specially if among the Top100, make sure your node is not missing all blocks for some reason(maybe the server is down. Who knows).

Back then I was defending a few ideas to be implemented such as the expiration of witness votes in order to prevent dead accounts^[2] from influencing the blockchain when they still have too much staked Hive Power. I believe that there should be an implementation of a mechanism to automatically set the deactivation key for a witness once it completes a month without a block production, witness update and witness price feed(all three conditions) as a mechanism to remove dead witnesses from the pool.

I know we now already have an implemented mechanism to remove governance power from accounts who are not updating their votes for over a year and this mechanism to automatically deactivate dead witnesses can be a little redundant, but it is a proposal that would help to increase stability within the blockchain. Besides, for a witness with too few votes to remain active it would just need to update the price feed once a month.

For some people this might be consider a nonissue or even an obsessive-compulsive disorder of some kind by someone who don't want to see dead witnesses being escalated for block production while stealing the spots of active witnesses with less votes. But it is an opinion I have.

Thank you for your attention.

^{2. A dead account is an account that has no activity for so long it is likely to have it's keys lost forever.}