[Taek]

Yes, its not genuine to say Eth has 400,000 validators as many of them are the same entity.

It's a similar story for nodes as well. A ton of the reported nodes are actually running on AWS and ultimately its a fairly worthless metric.

For a while the crypto community valued node count as a meaningful number for measuring decentralization, and naturally from that moment forward people have been fully shameless about running hundreds (at some points in history tens of thousands) of nodes just to boost metrics.

[ahtihn]

> A ton of the reported nodes are actually running on AWS

So? That doesn't mean anything, Amazon doesn't control the nodes just because they are running on its infra.

[latchkey]

Because, tomorrow, they could decide to make it against the ToS if they wanted to. Hetzner has already done this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728

[nl]

So people move them?

Control of the software is the relevant thing here. If AWS started modifying the software to make it fraudulent that's a problem.

Until that is an issue the hosting provider is as relevant as the bandwidth provider. It's just dumb compute.

[latchkey]

Move them where? As we've seen more recently with the OFAC list blocking... once one big player starts to block, the rest follow suit pretty quickly.

Remember also that a lot of the large staking players are staking on AWS and also have other external factors which dictate where they can host (taxes, corporations, shareholders, etc).

Many of the large players are also tied to AWS deployment APIs... moving means rewriting those. Ever worked with terraform before? It isn't just some trivial thing to point at another provider.

[nl]

> Move them where?

Google Cloud, Azure, deploy a server yourself, etc.

> As we've seen more recently with the OFAC list blocking... once one big player starts to block, the rest follow suit pretty quickly.

There's a big difference between something that is made illegal (eg the OFAC sanctions) and a private action by a company. If your service is illegal then you are going to have other problems than just AWS refusing to host.

> Many of the large players are also tied to AWS deployment APIs... moving means rewriting those.

There's a big difference between using AWS as dumb compute and using AWS features.

The more AWS features you use the more control AWS has. The same applies to any software you use - if a license can be withdrawn there is an element of control. These things are much more important than if the physical machine you are running on is owned by Amazon.

As I said above: Control is the important thing.

[latchkey]

> Google Cloud, Azure, deploy a server yourself, etc.

My point is that if AWS decides to follow Hetzner, the rest will too. If it was so easy to just deploy a server yourself, then more people would be doing that already. Right now, AWS is the lowest bar cause that's what half the people running this stuff know already [1].

> If your service is illegal

PoS / staking is a grey zone right now... there is a lot of discussion over the legalities.

> There's a big difference between using AWS as dumb compute and using AWS features.

Correct, but even the dumb compute involves setting up VPC's, networking, disk, monitoring, logging... etc... and each provider does it differently. For one staker, no big deal... but for the larger ones... it gets a lot more complicated.

[1] https://github.com/verida/storage-node#lambda-deployment

[terrio]

Guess what would happen if Amazon would just block certain type of traffic.

US gov or the CIA/fbi just forces AWS to do so.

Since Snowden not unreasonable.

[mhluongo]

Depends on the custodial setup!

[beaned]

Is this measurable? Is it possible to tell which nodes are running in the cloud, and count them?