A significant practical problem we have experienced with account creation is automated abuse of the signup process to yield free STEEM to attackers. This increases the average cost of legitimate account creation, making the Steem Protocol more expensive and less attractive to developers and potential partners. Presently, each new account is required to be funded by the account creator with initial Steem Power. The original reason for this was to give each account the requisite minimum Steem Power needed to transact on the blockchain. However, a side effect is that when a user fully powers down, they are temporarily locked out of their account. People need to be able to cash out without being at risk of losing access to their account.

The current system also incentivizes attackers creating multiple accounts in order to acquire free STEEM, which again increases the overall cost of maintaining the protocol. To solve this problem, we propose a new method of burning STEEM (i.e. destroying the tokens and removing them from the token supply) on each account creation and crediting the account with permanent minimum bandwidth instead of providing Steem Power to the new account. This will reduce incentives to abuse the steemit.com signup system and will prevent users from temporarily preventing themselves from transacting after powering down in full.
Read The Official Post https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/proposing-hardfork-0-20-0-velocity