@nijeah - Who broke the blockchain ?

2018-06-26 00:44:45

The @nijeah account started the first power down process of -1 VESTS.

2018-06-26 00:47:06

After the start of the power down process of first -2 VESTS and then -10,000,000,000 VESTS, the power down reaches its maximum of -1,000,000,000,000 VESTS, which is currently about -492,666,183,591 STEEM Power.

2018-07-03 00:47:00

The first payout of the Power Down process breaks the blockchain because it was a negative amount which was powered down so the blockchain didn't know how to handle it. There were any blocks produced at this point.

So far the problem has been solved and everything is running smoothly again. Witness Nodes updated to version 0.19.5, which solves the problem.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.19.5

---

This is a brief description of what happened. You can read more posts on this topic by @jerc33, @bobinson, @holger80, @ironshield and even @steemitblog.
But there was an interesting point @isnochys' that caught my attention. It draws a connection between @netuoso and @nijeah. Both sent SBD to the same bittrex address.

So the question is, who is this guy, @nijeah?
[…]
This points to @netuoso

His answer says that he is not involved in this issue but his support for the user may have helped him to do this:

I do not own or run the @nijeah account. Several months back I helped the user with a couple scripts and answered a few questions on discord. I was compensated for my time.
[…]
They did contain automated vesting withdrawals so could be related.

So one question remains: Who is @nijeah ?

The history of @nijeah

The account was created by @anonsteem on 2017-12-27 23:07:12. Since there is no STEEM transaction, it was created either with payment in LTC or in BTC. I don't see any possibility to get further information about the account holder here.

After creation, the account plagiarized @haejin's contributions and was caught five times by Steemcleaners.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Since January 8, 2018, the account was inactive until it began to power down a negative amount.

The relation between @nijeah and @netuoso

As mentioned above they both transferred SBD to the same bittrex address. @netuoso's answer seems reasonable, but the question why @nijeah didn't send SBD directly makes it suspicious.

So I dug into @nijeah to find any evidence that keeps the account. Pretty quickly I went over to do some research on the accounts @nijeah delegates to. These accounts are @grumpydog and @wewt.

@grumpydog is not very interesting. It was created by @nijeah and just upvoted @nijeah. So there is @wewt left.

@wewt - Another track pointing to @netuoso

@wewt was created by @msp3k ^[1] and @msp3k was created by @netuoso ^[2]. Both accounts set @netuoso as proxy ^{[3] , [4]}.
There are already two connections between @netuoso and @wewt, the creator and the witness voting.
Also the upvoting scheme shows a clear picture:

Author	Number of Upvotes by @wewt
@netuoso	28
@suheri	7
@chron	3
@yandot	2
@emrebeyler	2
@reko	2
26 more authors	29

Around 38.5% of all Upvotes went to @netuoso.

The last connection I found between @wewt and @netuoso was that @wewt set @netuoso as withdraw vesting route ^[5]. This means that when @wewt powers down VESTS, they automatically end up in the @netuoso account. You won't need to set this for every power down process manually.

When I completed all the research on @wewt, I have some pretty hard evidence that this account belongs to @netuoso. And the account, most likely operated by @netuoso, has a delegation from @nijeah that broke the blockchain yesterday.

---

I contacted @netuoso on Discord and asked him a few questions but I didn't get an answer yet. As soon as I get an answer I will edit it into this post afterwards. Or maybe he wants to make a statement in the comments? I would also appreciate this way.

To make it clear. I don't want accuse @netuoso of crashing the blockchain but there are interesting relations between the two accounts which I investigated here. To put it into the words of @isnochys:

We don't have a smoking gun here, but at least a gun with maybe fingerprints on it.

@netuoso wrote an open letter in which he denies any owner ship of @nijeah.
https://steemit.com/drama/@netuoso/open-letter-to-the-harassers-and-anyone-else-paying-attention-re-blockchain-freeze

---

^{Image source: https://pixabay.com/de/hacker-cyber-kriminalit%C3%A4t-internet-2300772/}

^{PS: On all 61 open Discord Server related to Steemit I joined, there is nowhere an account named @nijeah. But @netuoso got in contact with him on Discord…}