I'm writing this post because I have seen a lot of confusion and discussion about the account recovery feature on the Hive blockchain. It seems to me, that there is the idea that this feature can be used in many different situations, e.g. to recover your account when you have lost your password - which is NOT true.
How does the Hive Account Recovery work?
The main use for the account recovery is to get back control of your account when it got hacked. For this to work you need to cooperate with the person behind your account recovery account, so it is important that this person is someone who you trust and that will go through the recovery steps with you.
You can also only do this process up to 30 days after your account got compromised and your owner key was changed. After that your account is verly likely lost forever.
You can find your recovery account on: https://hiveblocks.com/@yourname. On this page search for "Recovery account".
You can change your recovery account here: @yourname/permissions
(Note that an account recovery change takes 30 days to go into effect)
The person trying to help you needs to verify that you are indeed the owner of the account - this is why the recovery account should be someone you know or at least trust enough with this. Additionally you need the old password or owner key of your account - which is why the account recovery won't help you with lost keys.
The general steps (without going to much into technical details) are:
- User contacts his recovery account and confirms his identity
- The recovery account broadcasts a "Request acocunt recovery" transaction, containing the new public key of the user account and the account to recover
- The user account broadcasts a "Recover account" transaction, containing the old and the new public keys of the user account
I actually never went through this stuff, so I apologize if I wrote something untrue here.
Starting an account recovery
If you have set an inactive account or someone you don't know or trust you should change your recovery account immediately.
If you have set any other person as your recovery account you need to contact them and they will guide you through the process.
If you have set @steem as your recovery account I advise you to change it as soon as possible. Steem won't recover your Hive account. (Go to the link at the beginning of this post for that)
I hope I have helped you with this article and clarified the misunderstandings about the recovery feature. If you have any questions or things to add about this topic feel free to leave a comment.