It’s another week and I’m here to make my submission to the task for the third week of the newbies initiative.
image designed by me on canva
In our last meeting, we spoke about hive keys , how to save your keys, how to set up a recovery account and how to keep your account safe.
I would like to thank our teachers 
You woke up early in the morning to find out that your
keys are not working and your account is not logging in, then you find out your account has been hacked.
As you leave your house every morning to work or any other place it’s obvious you lock your door or gates. Why do you lock your doors? To protect your valuable properties and other belongings. What you do use to lock your door? Your keys right. When you misplace the keys to your house you’re indirectly not going to be able to have access to your house. Also, when someone breaks into your house as a result of you not locking your door , you loose everything.
Same applies to Hive. The only difference is that hive is on your phone but you still need to protect it because it is your valuable property.
So basically, hive keys act as a means of security for your account. Losing your keys mean you lose your account and everything that come with it.
Hive keys come in 4 different types with each having a special function.
OWNER KEY
Owner key acts like your master key . It houses all the keys you need to use on the blockchain. It allows you to make changes to your active key, memo key and posting key. It also aid to recover your hive account incase you lose it.
ACTIVE KEY
Active key allows you to make transactions on the blockchain. If you want to send someone some hive or tokens, want to withdraw some hive or purchase tokens you will definitely need your private key. This key also allows you to power up or power down and also vote proposals and witnesses.
Simply put, active key is like your bank password or your mobile money pin
POSTING KEY
Posting key is what allows you to make a post,edit your posts, make comments on others posts,downvote posts and also upvote post.
Let’s just say, posting keys give you the power of hive, your own power.😅
MEMO KEY
Memo key is not really used as compared to the other keys . I have never made use of my memo key because I didn’t know how to use it. Thanks to our teacher, I do now.
Memo key allows you to send encrypted messages on transfers on the blockchain and also decrypt encrypted messages which have been sent to you on transfers on the blockchain.
Keys are meant to secure your house and so are Hive keys meant to secure your account. Hive keys are in the form that cannot be crammed or learnt because they are a mixture of numbers and words and they are quite long.
One way to keep your hive keys very safe is to write them down on a paper and keep it in a safe place. This way , you can always go for it when you need it.
It is also advisable to avoid saving our keys online. For example, in our mail , whatsapp or any other place where it is likely to get hacked.
One can also store their keys on a pen drive or a hard drive the belongs to him or her. With this, giving out your pen drive to others can lead to someone getting access to your keys so make sure to use a personal drive used by you alone.
There are many ways our hive accounts can get hacked and this is why we are always advised to be extra careful with our keys.
Giving someone access to your keys can lead to your account getting hacked. Recently, there was an issue of some newbies loosing their account and all the funds they had. How this this happen?
This happened because the individual who signed them up on hive had access to their keys. I’m sure they didn’t have any knowledge on that but now they do.
So, keep your keys private and safe.
One is likely to lose his account through clicking on untrusted links. Following links which you do not know what it entails would most likely lead you to lose your account. Curiosity kills the cat, so to those of us who are extra curious and want to see everything, moderate your curiosity before you get killed. Lol
Using the wrong keys for the wrong purpose can also get your account hacked. This mostly occurs when we are trying to copy and paste our keys to carry out activities. I once almost made a mistake by pasting my active key in a different website aside the one I intended to use.
So let’s be extra cautious with how and where we copy and paste our keys to.
HOW TO RECOVER YOR ACCOUNT INCASE IT GETS HACKED
To do this, you need to have a recovery account. Recovery account helps you to recover your account if it gets hacked. This account should be a trusted one.
This is how to set up your recovery account. I will be using peakd to demonstrate how to set up a recovery account.
First, login to your profile on peakd as shown in the image below**
Next, select account settings and click on keys and permissions from the drop down menu.
Thirdly, select recovery account and click on change recovery account.
Enter the account name you trust and enter your owner key as required in the dialog box below.
It takes 30 days for the change to take effect and so bear it in mind your recovery account will start to work after 30 when you’re setting it up or changing it.
To conclude, our hive keys are very essential components of the hive blockchain and we are required to keep them safe. We cannot always be a 100% but we can try as much as possible to protect our account and not leave our keys exposed. If you avoid clicking on links you do not trust and not entering your keys into untrusted sites, it’s a big step to protecting your account.
Also keeping your keys offline can help in protecting your account. We should try to set recovery accounts so that when our accounts get compromised, we can retrieve them.
I hope you learnt something new today and you enjoed reading. Thank you.🙂
