On May 1, 2022, I began to power down my over 180 HP in a slow and sad process of exiting from the hive platform.
What really happened:
Saying I love the Hive ecosystem is understating it; I absolutely believe in the potential of Hive to cause a lot of positive disruption in fields such as finance, social media, gaming, investing, etc., and as such, I was ready to invest a sizeable part of my funds into the ecosystem so as to be a part of this amazing movement, but in order for me to do this, I first had to secure my account in a foolproof way.
Hive was built on the basis of decentralization, and while this may come with a lot of perks and use cases, it also has one double-edged sword kind of advantage: YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF YOUR FUNDS!
If anything goes wrong with access to your account, no one can help you—and something did infact go wrong.
A genius idea...or not?
When creating my account, I did the needful as expected by downloading my private keys and storing them somewhere safe, but few months later, I began to feel this wasn't enough, so I embarked on a Tomb Raider-style encoding of my keys.😄
First, I devised a system to alter some characters in my private keys, and then, sort-of-like a decryption algorithm, I created a manual on how I altered the characters and how to reverse them. Pretty sleek, right?
Source
Storing the keys in the same location just didn't make sense (much like hiding a key next to the safe it opens), so I stored the encrypted private keys on flash drive A and the decryption algorithm on flash drive B. As a precaution, I also wrote out the procedure in a special notebook and kept it together with other special books.
Sad Discovery
Now this is where things kinda went sideways:
sometime around April 2022, for reasons I can't remember anymore, I brought out my flash drive B to check something out on it, but to my chagrin, I got a stomach-twisting prompt saying the drive was corrupted and had to be formatted.
I tried everything I could to repair it without erasing the contents, but nothing worked, so I succumbed with the hope of a backup I wrote out somewhere. Well, suffice it to say that lightning did indeed strike the same place twice on the same day! By a stroke of unbelievable ill-luck, I couldn't find my backup notebook where I kept it.
There's really no point trying to explain how frantically I searched for it over the next few days.
I had to come to terms with reality:
The day I lose access to my computer or have any need to format it is the day I lose access to my Hive account; hence the need to power down and remove my funds in it while I still could.
And as I feared, over the past few months I changed the device through which I access the hive ecosystem, resulting in having no access to perform any critical operations on my account. I became just a passive spectator on the platform, with no way of actively participating.
The comeback!
Yea, I know what you must have been wondering... How did I resolve this quagmire?
Well, there were days when I sat down with the encrypted private keys and tried to decipher them (after all, I created the encryption system I used), but heck! It really was foolproof; not even I could crack it.
A few days ago (date), I wanted to restore my Metamask wallet on my phone and needed the seed phrase, which I wrote in a dusty, ancient-looking journal of mine a few years ago, and funny enough, right on the next page were my private keys (unencrypted), staring back at me with all their glory! I stared back at the page for what felt like an eternity, then the memories all came rushing back. After opening my account and downloading my private keys, I also wrote them out in my journal for safekeeping!
My joy was indescribable. Of course, I could have just opened a new account, but apart from the fact that it would be a violation of the rules, that also meant I'd have had to begin making connections and friends from the start. It just didn't sit right with me.
I'm so glad to be back. A lot of amazing things have happened over this period I've been away:
upgraded their UI and added some new features such as long-form articles, communities,microblogging/threads etc. to make the platform even more social.
- The #hive community became better and stronger, and the crypto crash did little to affect the community.
I'm basically trying to catch up on months worth of developments.
I'm grateful to those who reached out or checked on me, especially Iskafan. I'm glad to see you're still creating amazing contents steadily.
I'm also happy that some of my favorite writers and content creators, such as @Mauromar, @Iskafan, @Taskmaster, @Belemo, 
I've learned my lesson; no more playing Tom Cruise with my keys. I've devised a much simpler and effective method for securing my keys.
Going forward, I just want to invest more in the project, create worthy contents, and make more friends and connections. Cheers, fams! It's good to be back!
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My name is Edwin Ifeanyi Louis (