Hive blockchain is a secure place where you do all the transactions on the chain with the help of your private keys. There are two types of keys, namely private keys and public keys. These keys are created when you create your account on the chain. There is a master password that governs all these additional keys. Keeping the private keys safe is very important. Public keys are public and it can be shared with anyone but private keys should not be shared with anyone. Especially the active keys and owner keys should not be shared with anyone.
For anyone getting started on Hive, it can be slightly confusing to understand the different sets of keys we have on Hive. Even some of the experienced members don't know about the keys completely. It is easy to understand these keys as passwords but they are not. For those who don't have a full idea about private keys, I recommend reading some articles to understand and even if it is still not clear, there is no harm in asking a senior member who understands private keys well.
We have a facility on the chain where we can grant authority permission to someone. If you need to share your account permission with others, it can be done with the help of providing authorities instead of giving the private keys directly to them. With the help of account authorities, people can impersonate and do the required tasks. The main advantage of sharing it this way is to just revoke the permissions instead of changing the keys every time. If we don't want to continue providing access to someone, we can revoke the key permissions at any time.
This is one of the best features we have on the Hive blockchain. The reason is that we don't have the need to keep changing the keys regularly and keeping them safe. There shouldn't be a need to provide anyone with access or keep changing the access to someone but even if that happens, it is good to just provide authority permission instead of sharing the key directly.
When we are writing bots on Hive to automate some tasks, the private keys might be required. In some cases, there can be a necessity to work with multiple accounts. Even in that case, it is sufficient to have just one key in the environment file or config file. The remaining accounts that are being used by the bot can have the authority provided to the primary account so that handling keys becomes easier.
If you like what I'm doing on Hive, you can vote me as a witness with the links below.
@balaz as a Hive Witness 
@kanibot as a Hive Engine Witness|
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