I have been following Bulwark for a little while now, have mined it, traded it, participated in the community discord.
Thank you for being a part of our community.
Recently Bulwark had some issues with the block chain forking, I was only present and for one of the forks but the discussion was that a large amount of hash power which was blamed on NiceHash causing a fork of the block chain and the wallets, mining pools and the exchange wallets were out of sync and couldn't decide on which of the now multiple forks was the 'right' one and reach a consensus. Some of the pools disabled mining, some of the exchanges disabled the wallet so no more withdrawals or deposits.
The Developer that was present at the time said that this is quite a headache and that since it was decentralized there is nothing they can do about it and to wait and see how to plays out. At the time of the fork and the influx of hashing power in the magnitudes greater than 51% of the global hash rate there was also a DDoS attack on Bulwark and yes its decentralized but a community actively making a decision on which fork is the real fork and working towards achieving consensus by manipulating nodes is a bit grey.
The developer in the community discord post a list of nodes to add to wallets, that supposedly had the 'right' block chain and urged users to update their wallets. I did this and erased the block chain and sync'd my wallet with the bsod.pw version of the block chain. Everything was now in order as far as I was aware.
On 2/2/2018, a malicious actor forked our chain in a multi-staged attack. They DDOSed our seed nodes and then used Nicehash to freeze the main chain before re-employing Nicehash on a different pool, causing a network fork. We caught this quickly and the offending public pool reindexed, orphaning 30 blocks on the fork. We promptly asked Cryptopia to close the wallet and had them re-open it within a few hours once the chain re-consolidated.
This happened a second time on 2/4/2018, but instead the attacker used a private pool. This time, the fork split our network, separating exchanges, wallets, masternodes and mining pools. We promptly asked Cryptopia to close the wallet to prevent a 51% attack, market dumping, and significant damage to our coin's economy. You're right that the coin there is still in maintenance and deposits and withdraws are being prevented. This is for the best interest of the coin's economy - we cannot idly sit by as a 51% attacker dumps an exchange with fake coins before abandoning a forked chain - regaining the coins and keeping the Bitcoin they effectively stole. Not going to happen.
Today I come online to the discord and to discover that there are MasterNodes on the Bulwark network which are now idle and not earning rewards and the MasterNode owners in the community are trying to fix their MasterNodes so they can start receiving rewards, the developers response was to wait for a new wallet because any work they did now to repair their MasterNode would just have to be repeated when a new wallet was released. Since MasterNodes are not exactly cheap it would be very understandable that owners would be concerned so I said in the Discord that I would be concern if my MasterNode was idle and not earning rewards. Which for this I was promptly banned from their discord server. I made a polite request in their Telegram that my ban be reviewed which prompted my swift ban from their Telegram group also.
Due to the network fork, Masternodes began treating one and other as misbehaving peers. This resulted from a number of problems, including different wallet versions being in operation concurrently. A user can get their masternode up, running, and stable by utilizing the latest version of our release code, 1.2.0.3 on their VPS and desktop wallet. We are in the process of releasing a mandatory update to our Linux, Windows, and Mac wallets to address the multiple wallet versions on the network. This, combined with additional back-end work we are doing to strengthen our DNS seeders against a similar attack should bring our blockchain back to a point where we can safely re-enable exchange trading.
I am writing on the forum to see if their is concern about what is happening with Bulwark and its development from the community here, as I have a stake in Bulwark as a crypto but being removed from the community casts some doubt on the whole crypto and its governance. They seem to be quite happy that the exchanges stopped deposits and withdrawals, now all my conspiracy senses are tingling and I am open to discussion on the matter.
I appreciate your concern and want to assure you that we are doing our best to be good stewards of our coin, our users, and their concerns. As I am sure you can imagine, this type of attack on a network is not something any community wants to face. We would like to never be put into a situation where our coin is forked via a series of malicious actions again. We were hoping that it was an honest mistake, that's what we thought about the first fork that quickly corrected. Due to the nature of the attack and the fact that there was one chain being mined by everyone except the attacker and another chain (that was farther behind, with lower hash rate, and being mined on a private pool) our decision on the chain to support was clear.
Please let me know what your thoughts are and your opinions on the events, especially if you have experienced them.
We are extremely passionate about our community. It is a true feat to be banned from any of our community engagement portals. We generally only ban users who are toxic (least common), scammers (less common), or spammers (most common).
Is NiceHash users to blame for forking a block chain, is it really too much hash power in one place. Bulwark has always been very centralized due to a couple of very large pools.
We encourage our users to mine on multiple pools and to distribute hash power. There are a few pools that - for whatever reason - have attracted a larger number of users. As much as we ask our miners to try to spread hash power, we do not have the ability to control them. Our chain has been being hit with multiple TH/s from Nicehash since we launched. Look at the difficulty spikes. It would be great if miners would seek out small pools to spread hash power, but we can't force them to do anything.
Censorship in the community is a huge concern for me, just leads me to believe they are hiding something, who else have they silenced.
Transparency is extremely important. We are not hiding anything. We are clear in what we know, what we believe, and what we are doing. Critics, users with concerns, and people asking challenging questions are not being silenced. Bulwark is focused on providing individuals freedom through privacy and part of that is entertaining ideas that we aren't comfortable with. We will revisit your ban in a few days.
Frogman
