The Importance of your Steem Wallet keys

There have been a lot of posts dealing with Steem Wallet keys. Yet, it seems that I still know a lot of people that do not understand what their keys are, what they should be used for, and how to protect them.

What is a wallet

A wallet is a set of key pairs, which is a cryptographic term and something that has been around forever. What is interesting is that when the blockchain was created, it used these same cryptographic properties that had been used to encrypt and secure data for decades, and turned it into basically a giant ledger utilizing these properties.

For instance, a key pair is a public key and a private key. To try to simplify it. Your public key is like your account number. If somebody wants to send you something, they can use this public key, that everybody in the world knows, and send you a message, crypto, whatever, to that address.

Your private key is like your signature. If you want to send something from your address, from your account, you need to know the private key to sign off on the transaction. This is why keeping your private key secure is of the utmost importance! Somebody having your private key means they can send stuff from your address! This is why the private key is always longer, meaning there are more possibilities for what the key could be and it adds more security. (In a nutshell)

So what keys should I worry about on Steemit?

ALL of them. Keeping your private keys PRIVATE is extremely important. Remember, not only is Steem a social media platform, it is also the wallet that holds your money. Your Steem account IS a wallet on the blockchain. Everything you do, is signed from your wallets address by your private key and sent out to the world. For anybody to act as you, they just needs your keys.

There are five keys in all. The posting key, memo key, active key, witness key and OWNER key. Each one of these can do specific things on your account, and some overlap a bit. So let’s take a look.

Posting Key

By signing your transaction and sending it to the blockchain, this gives you the permission to post, upvote, comment, reSteem, claim rewards, and follow. This should be the key that you log in with everyday. This gives you the greatest security when utilizing the Steem platform. If you lose this key through Social Engineering or Malware, it is not as big of a deal as some of the other keys. The more you use your key, the greater the chance in losing it.

Memo Key

This key simply allows you to decrypt private messages sent to you. This is the only key that can do this. The security aspect of this key should circle around how important you feel your conversations are to stay private.

Active Key

This key is basically a manager key. It can do almost anything on your account. That includes transferring money out of your account, changing most of your keys (including itself), witness voting, powering down or up your Steem, and some other functions. It can do EVERYTHING on the account except change the OWNER key

OWNER Key

I know it might have been annoying reading all the caps for owner key. But I am REALLY trying to stress how important this key is. This is the key that you need to know to gain control of your account if you ever lose your keys. This should ONLY be used as a last resort to keep your account yours in the case your active key is stolen by someone. Using this key, somebody can change your Owner key, and then every other key, completely locking you out of your account.

It is best to keep the Owner Key OFF your computer. You can do this by putting the key into a .txt file and encrypting the file. (I use Axcrypt) You can then copy this onto a few flash drives and store them in extremely safe places. You could keep one in the bank safety deposit box along with one in your safe at home. These ensure that no matter what happens, you will have access to your owner key.

Signing Key

This is a key that Witnesses use to sign their blocks when they send them, verified, to the blockchain. This can be better explained in witness posts. It is not needed by a user only they are setting up a witness node.

What is Important

If you took anything away from this, please just remember to NEVER use your owner key except in the worst case scenario of losing your active key. If you never use your owner key, the chances of losing your account completely to someone else is extremely small. Use your posting key everyday! And never enter your key into a site you are unsure of.

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If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this post. You can also message me on:

Steemit.chat: BiasNarrative
Discord: BiasNarrative#7776

-BiasNarrative