Steem Smart. Steem Careful. How I lost 650 real dollars with Steemit.

Hello. I’m @mynameisbrian, aka an idiot.

Two days ago I came across an article about #steemit and thought to myself, “Wow! What a great idea”. I immediately signed up and eagerly began exploring the site. Of course I came across the unavoidable @wang posts and followed the instructions to secure my account. Now I’m not a cryptocurrency expert, but I do know a little; thus while updating my passwords it did occur to me I should print or write down my private keys. “I’ll do it later,” I said to myself as I was not at home.

Perhaps I was a tiny bit overzealous at the time, but after steeming for a while I was craving some #steem power. I bought a #bitcoin, sent it to my account, and browsed a bit more before logging off and continuing with my merry day.

The next day I try to log on and there are issues. I’m sure everyone is aware of the trouble the steemit site experienced over the past day or two. I was finally able to access my account and I was prompted to update my passwords. As I said, I’m an idiot so I did so without securing my private keys. After updating the owner password, I quickly discovered that I was no longer able to access my account. Old passwords, new passwords, no passwords work! Sigh…

I emailed support for #help and received a response that the issue will be resolved shortly. Great! I followed up the next day and haven’t received any response.

I can’t help but think to myself that the issue will not be resolved. The devs are busy and I’m not entirely sure they can restore access. Honestly though I kind of think I deserve to lose that #bitcoin because of my stupidity. I’ll be super happy if I regain access to my account, but in the meantime I’m chalking it up as a loss so I don’t stress about it.

Anyway, I want to continue using the site so I created another account. I also wanted to post a #PSA to the community.

Secure your private keys! You may never need them if you manage your steem completely through steemit, but if you ever do need them you’ll be quite sad if you don’t have them.

That being said, I also think as #steemit moves out of beta it will need to make clearer for the user exactly how an account should be secured and what the possible repercussions are for not doing so. The great thing about #steemit is that it is going to bring many new people into the world of cryptocurrency that never would have discovered it otherwise. Steemit, as an initial gateway, will need to do a better job at getting them up to speed.

Happy steeming,

Idiot