I'm Back, Still Trading, and My Quest For My Hive Key

Hello Everyone,
It's been awhile since I've posted, I'm still trading, still writing, and still HODLing. I might post some of my trading journal entries to give you some insight into my journey from my first trade in 2017 to where I am now. It's been a hell of a journey from the 2017 high in BTC, through the "Volmageddon" in February 2018, through tariffs and trump tweets, a crypto bear market, the March 2020 liquidity crisis, and the ridiculously fast recovery, and now a new bull cycle in crypto. I've witnessed the supply of money expand at an exponential rate unmatched in history. It is an exciting time to be involved in trading and I'm still learning more about markets every single day. In case you were wondering, I'm definitely not rich yet but I am slightly better off than I was 3 years ago. I still have a long way to go on my journey to become a successful full time trader, but one thing I know for sure is that I'm not ever going to give up. If you happen to be new at trading, and some guru or somebody tells you they can teach you how to trade in a a short amount of time, run far away and find someone else to learn from. This journey is not a quick one, its not easy, and the path to success is littered with the remains of failed traders and blown accounts. You might have some success early on in your journey and think you have figured it out, but eventually the market will kick your ass and remind you that your still a n00b. Be prepared to devote multiple years to the learning process. I haven't spent the entire 3 years learning how to trade 7 days a week 12 hours a day though, I suppose if you have that kind of time to devote to it you could learn in a year or two. But for those of us like me who fit trading around a day job they need to survive, its going to be a much longer process. And it's worth every minute.

I wanted to give the Hive Blockchain another shot after looking at several other crypto based social media platforms and being disappointed with most of what else is available. I thought I would be able to just fire up my old account and start blogging, after all I am someone (or so I thought) who is very careful with all my keys and passwords no matter how trivial. Turns out I had managed to both write down my owner key wrong. That's ok I thought, I still have a copy saved in an encrypted database of various keys and passwords. But it turned out the key I had stored in there was wrong too. The frustrating thing was I did have the correct posting key but I found out I didn't have the owner key when I tried to change my recovery account from Hive account@steem to something safer. I remembered that back when I created the account I had initially saved all the keys in a password protected page in a Microsoft OneNote notebook. Somewhere along the line I had realized this was a horrible place to store your keys to anything because I was storing not only in the cloud, but in a cloud controlled by Microsoft. So I deleted them from OneNote and copied them, incorrectly, to paper and the encrypted offline database. At first I thought I was screwed and would never be able to use this account fully again, but then I remembered I had made an offline backup of the original OneNote file because I believed in redundancy even back when I was just starting out with crypto. Unfortunately my backup file was so old the new version of OneNote failed to load the password protected part of it. At this point I've spent about 4 or 5 hours trying different versions of the key I had written down, looking various places for the proper key, and generally getting very frustrated. There was one thing left to try, I found an old laptop, loaded an old version of OneNote onto it, and managed to get into the old backup file and finally recovered my owner key to this account. After so many failed attempts this was incredibly satisfying, like solving a good puzzle. I learned a few important lessons from this.

When you back up your keys, make sure your actually backing up the right keys. Doublecheck every character, and then check it again. You don't want to be that person who lost his keys 5 years ago watching the coin moon without them.
Always have a plan b and a plan c when it comes to your keys. Well when it comes to anything really but especially your keys.
Old laptops and outdated software come in handy sometimes.

Remember, not your keys, not your crypto.