How to create and use a cold wallet on Hive
If you have any significant amount of money, you should do whatever you can to protect it. In a decentralized economy, you are your own bank and no one else is going to protect it for you.
In crypto, there is a concept of a hot and cold wallet.
Think of a hot wallet as the wallet you carry in your pocket day to day, you have enough to buy coffee, lunch, maybe buy a few things. Most of your money though is in a bank and not available to you without some sort of checkout process. A cold wallet is more like your savings account, really easy to deposit funds into but a little more difficult to take out.
If one day you get mugged, all they can steal what is in your (hot) wallet. Your savings are generally safe and secure. You can accomplish the same thing on Hive by using a second account that acts as your cold wallet. It is really that simple, but there is a little more to how you use it.
On Hive there are lots of opportunities to send money, you can send tips, gamble it with one of the few Hive casinos, buy Splinterlands cards, or participate in @hivetorch.
Hive has a built in savings feature that allows you to lock up your funds with a 3 day delay to remove them. This feature serves gives you a little bit of protection against yourself spending it and a potential hacker stealing it before you can recover your account. It functions pretty good for this purpose, but it is a rarely used feature on the Hive.
Using a second account you can send funds to when your main account gets over your acceptable risk threshold. In fact, anyone can send you money and if you are expecting a large amount of Hive from someone for doing work on a project or any other reason, you can have them send directly to your (cold wallet) second account.
The main advantage of this is you can continue to use your main high profile account to participate in apps like Splinterlands and games without great risk to your account. If you properly set up your recovery account to someone you trust, you should be able to recover your account before any major damage is done. If some how your account is compromised, your funds are safe.
By using Hive in this manor, you will not frequently need to log in to your cold wallet account further reducing the risk that the keys will be compromised. You can even create barriers to having access to this account by storing keys off site, or making them more difficult to get to.
As always, you should always take great precaution when working with your active, master, and owner keys. Only using those keys when it is absolutely necessary. Recent modifications to Hive Wallet has minimized using these keys as you can no longer login to Hive.blog using them. There are services like Hive Signer that will ask for them to add posting authority and other features to your account.
You should get in the habit of always second guessing yourself when pulling out your owner, master, and active keys. Check your browser and make sure you are where you expect to be, you have a valid signed certificate, and you really need this level of access at the time.
Be safe out there.
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