Is Bulwark Unique?
By: Kane Vanner
Tags: Security, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Privacy, Hardware

What we provide.

In short, Bulwark provides a whole ecosystem, based around our core values. Everyone from the Bulwark team would be able to provide their own distinct description, however, I believe that 2 core points we all agree on are:

Everyone should have equal access to having a private life.

Everyone should be treated fairly, regardless of wealth, background, or knowledge.

So how exactly do we apply these core values to what we create.

The Coin.

From the very beginning, Bulwark was created to have a fair distribution of coins. Using a slow start mechanism to ensure that no early miners would get a huge share of the initial coins, a fair algo to minimize the effect of ASIC/FPGA/Nicehash miners, and a small premine, sufficient to fund the coin for the 1st year while we build a community.

We see the fruits of this effort in any analysis of our coin supply, in May 2018 Omni Analytics showed that we have one of the fairest coin distributions in the privacy masternode space.

This is a particularly important figure for a Proof of Stake coin, as it means that everyone has the potential to mint coins, without the need for risky staking pools, or to make a huge investment to see returns within your lifetime (as is the case with PoW and PoS when there is an unfair distribution).

Another part of being a fair coin, is ease of use. The most advanced crypto user should not have an advantage over even the newest beginner, for this reason, we’ve made staking from your QT wallet as simple as a button press, we’ve made simple scripts to allow for staking and running masternodes as easy as copy+pasting, this also leads us to our hardware, the 1st piece of which was created to make running a masternode or staking 24/7 as simple and secure as possible.

Our Hardware.

The values we set out for the coin and our ecosystem is supported by our hardware offerings. I’ll start off with the home node, and then go in to more speculative territory with our planned offerings.

The Bulwark Secure Home Node allows anybody to support the network, we expect you would be able to pass the SHN to anybody who has used a computer before, and they would be able to use our user-friendly scripts and tutorials to run a masternode or stake their Bulwark, while supporting the network we all share with a always-online archival node. This supports our 1st value, by allowing anybody, regardless of IT ability, to host a masternode via the TOR network, ensuring their true identity remains hidden.

Additionally, this supports our second value. Many VPS hosting services may restrict who they service. With Bulwark, there is no such restriction as the purchasing process remains as anonymous as possible, by accepting crypto payments through our secure payments portal. This ensures there is no discrimination when it comes to who can run a Bulwark masternode or staking server.

As for our future developments:

The Bulwark hardware wallet, is a development with the goal of allowing anybody to access a hardware wallet for any coin. A gap we noticed in the market is that existing hardware wallet solutions had expensive listing fees for their stores or even their development packages to join the platform, so unless your coin had a large premine or was well established, there was no way to join these platforms.

The Bulwark hardware wallet will be truly open source, meaning any coin can adapt it for their platform, expanding the reach of hardware wallet solutions, allowing anyone, regardless of choice of coin, to have access to the privacy and security benefits of using a hardware wallet.

Finally, I’d like to touch on the home router. The goal of the Bulwark home router is to give anybody access to garlic encryption and routing by working with the Kovri project and bringing a hardware solution to the table. In short, the goal is to create what is in essence a VPN solution, over I2P, but with a decentralized network of endpoints formed by masternodes, meaning with each masternode that comes online, your data becomes safer and safer. We’ll have a full blog post about Kovri coming soon, with a further post about the router and how it implements Kovri closer to launch.