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Hey everyone!
I am appearing out of the depths of my PhD to rant a little bit about a rookie mistake I've made.
You've all heard the mantra "Not your keys, not your coins". It is repeated over and over again to newbies, and I've probably said it myself. But do as I say, not as I do ...
Back in I think 2018, I opened a bank account with Bitwala who promised easy BTC and ETH trading, tied to a bank account with an actual banking license. Neat! Makes it much easier to transfer fiat to crypto and back!
For a while, it went fine. I had my seed phrase and Bitwala promised they don't have access to it. Have a little faith, people!
Then, Bitwala changed to Nuri. I didn't care much about it, it's just a rebrand, right?
...Right?
When the ETH price was soaring a few months back, I tried to sell the few fractions of ETH resting in my wallet. And the sale failed. And failed. And failed again.
I contacted the support team, but for two months there was no reply and ETH prices fell. Great.
Eventually, tech support got back to me:
Whatever "syncing my vault" means, but alright! Of course I still have my seed phrase, I'm no newbie (and I've explained to enough people not to lose their Hive master password. Repeatedly.)
Syncing my vault did nothing, so we moved on ...
Seemed reasonable. So I tried that and was told by the app that my seed phrase is not valid. Which couldn't be, I had it neatly saved in a password manager. Again, I'm not new to this!
MetaMask in fact allowed me to import the vault without issues, but the balance was 0 ETH. Still, I do not have more than one ETH wallet!
After tech support proved useless, I did a deep dive into how ETH actually works, as so far I hadn't needed it. I learned about wallet addresses changing, funds being tied to those addresses, and the fact that you apparently need your seed phrase and a private key that matches the wallet you want to import.
Gosh am I glad Hive isn't that unnecessarily complicated, otherwise onboarding new users would be even harder.
Luckily, there are a bunch of tools that let you calculate private keys if you have your seed phrase and some technical information!
And that'd all be nice and dandy, if it wasn't for the "Derivation Path" field.
You see, that seems necessary to get the private key I'm looking for.
And Nuri, formerly Bitwala, doesn't share that fucking derivation path, which makes it impossible to restore that wallet anywhere but their own app.
Now I might have terribly misunderstood how ETH works, as I'm not great with the technical details.
But the bottom line is this: I have my seed phrase and I know it is correct
So everything else should be working.
I thought I owned my keys, but apparently I do not. Welp, I'm writing it off as a learning opportunity and will continue harassing tech support.
We'll see what happens.