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How can I keep my HIVE crypto safe?

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The best way to keep your HIVE crypto safe is to power it up and stake it on your account which you control the private keys to.

While the best way to keep Bitcoin and certain other cryptocurrencies safe is to store them in a cold wallet, this isn’t the case for HIVE.

To put it simply, the process of powering up HIVE to Hive Power, is the blockchain’s lingo for staking your coins.

Remember, Hive uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) blockchain protocol and is designed to reward users who stake their Hive as Hive Power.

In this section of the Hive guide, we discuss why powering up your HIVE is the best way to keep it safe, as well as going over a few key account safety checks that are often overlooked.

Powering up your HIVE

As we mentioned above, the best way to keep your HIVE crypto safe is to power it up.

This is done on your own account wallet, of which you control the private keys to.

“Powering up” refers to moving HIVE to Hive Power (HP) within your wallet and locks it away for 13 weeks.

To unstake your coins and turn HP back into liquid HIVE, the process takes 13 weeks over which you receive equal weekly payments.

If someone gets a hold of the keys to your account, this gives you time to realise and begin the account recovery process hopefully without suffering too much damage.

Powering up keeps your HIVE safe by giving you time.

Advantages of powering up your HIVE:

Keeps your HIVE crypto safe: While nobody else should gain access to your account’s private keys, mistakes happen. By having your HIVE powered up, you can minimise any potential damage.

Get a bigger upvote: The more HP you have staked, the bigger your upvote on the Hive blogging platform is. Have a bigger say on how the rewards pool is divided up via your upvotes.

Earn bigger curation rewards: With bigger upvotes, comes the potential to earn bigger curation rewards on the back of your efforts. To maximise curation rewards, find good quality content and upvote early.

Ability to delegate HP: By powering up your HIVE, you then have the ability to delegate your Hive Power to other accounts. This can be to accounts offering payouts such as @leo.voter’s 16%, or simply to help others.

Gain respect within the community: Hive is a community first and foremost, so don’t underestimate the respect (and upvotes) you will receive by building a stake in the community. You want to get noticed? Power up your HIVE.

Setting your recovery account

When it comes to keeping your HIVE safe, one often overlooked aspect is your recovery account.

Your recovery account is another Hive account that is able to initiate the recovery process for your account, in case it has been compromised.

A lot of old Hive accounts saw their recovery account reamin automatically set to Steemit which is obviously no help here.

Instead, change your recovery account to a second account or someone you trust via the permissions section of your account on PeakD.

Understanding Recovery via PeakD:

If your account keys have been stolen and used by someone else, first try to use your own OWNER key to change your keys.

However, the thief could change the keys themself (if the OWNER key or MASTER password has been stolen) and locked you out.

If this happens you will need to recover your account.

A recovery account should be:

  1. Someone you personally know and trust to verify that your account was compromised and

  2. They can validate that you want to "recover" the account and

  3. They are unlikely to also be compromised at the same time.

Don’t keep your HIVE on exchanges

Our final tip to keeping your HIVE crypto safe is to keep your Hive off centralised exchanges.

Not only are you sacrificing curation rewards by not powering up your HIVE, but you’re opening yourself up to a whole raft of other issues.

To put it kindly, centralised exchanges are not your friend.

Consider Justin Sun’s hostile takeover of the Steem blockchain.

In order for Justin Sun to gain control, he convinced his friends at exchanges (like Changpeng Zhao at Binance), to power up all of the STEEM tokens in customer’s hot wallets in order to vote for network witnesses.

Now obviously this is highly unethical, but code is the law and all you need to vote on the governance of a DPoS blockchain, is stake.

Something that leaving liquid HIVE on exchanges gives them if they choose to power it up.

Remember the old saying: Not your keys, not your crypto!

TO keep your HIVE crypto safe, don’t leave it in hot wallets on exchanges.

Keep it powered up on your account which you control the private keys to.

Best of probabilities to you.



Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.

Why not leave a comment and share your thoughts on keeping your HIVE crypto safe in the comments section below? All comments that add something to the discussion will be upvoted.

This Hive crypto blog is exclusive to leofinance.io.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta