Managing your Steem wallet

Many reminders are made during the account creation process, but this point cannot be stressed enough: your password/owner key is the only way to exercise ownership over your account and you should never lose it or expose it to unwarranted persons. Therefore, password or cryptographic key protection is the most important aspect of managing a Steem wallet.

A Steem account has a hierarchical key structure, with four different types of private keys that give particular account permissions:

• Owner Key: this is the master key for your account, with all permissions, and it has the power to change all the other keys
• Active Key: this is used to place market orders and to make currency transfers, and it also gives posting permissions
• Posting Key: this is used for posting and voting on posts only
• Memo Key: this is used to create and read memos only

Keeping your private keys safe

• Do not store your cryptographic keys in plain text where untrusted people can access them
• If you choose to store your keys on the cloud, consider encrypting the text files first before uploading them
• Be careful not to paste your private keys in your posts by mistake as this will expose them to the whole world
• Have sufficient backups of your private keys (both online and offline)
• Whenever you feel that your keys have been compromised, quickly change your Steem master password, as this will also change all keys associated with your account.

Know your way around

Wallet page

Clicking Wallet on either the side navigation menu or the top menu will take you to your Wallet page on Utopian. This page shows you the current status of your Steem wallet (how much of the currencies you hold and a brief history of your transactions). It also shows you how much the STEEM and SBD currencies are trading for on the cryptocurrency markets.

From this page, you can make transfers of either STEEM or SBD to other Steem accounts. To perform other actions such as powering down your account, you’ll need to go to steemit.com and access your wallet from there.

Performing other actions

To avoid making mistakes with your Steem wallet, it helps to know your way around the wallet. Knowing how to perform actions in a safe manner will help you avoid costly mistakes. Your Steem wallet contains real and valuable currency and you should take care when using it.

The following tutorials will help you learn how to manage your Steem wallet:

• Changing your master password/owner key
• Powering up your Steem account
• Powering down your Steem account
• Transferring STEEM or SBD to another Steem account
• Exchanging STEEM/SBD on the internal market