10% of Ethereum nodes at risk of being booted from Hetzner

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=10-of-ethereum-nodes-at-risk-of-being-booted-from-cloud-hosting-provider

by shafyy • 4 years ago

6 8 4 years ago

sp332• 4 years ago

I didn't realize that crypto mining was allowed on AWS either. I guess it is allowed but it wasn't profitable until earlier this year.

mushprom• 4 years ago

That's what I used my $100 trial credit for years ago.

pjc50• 4 years ago

"16% of all hosting nodes (a category that makes up 62% of all nodes by network type) are hosted with Hetzner—10% of all nodes. If 10% of all Ethereum nodes being supported by one company sounds awfully centralized to you, wait til you hear that 30% run on Amazon services."

A real problem for decentralization proponents: there's always a positive return to scale somewhere, which will tend to suck everything back into a center. So you get "decentralization" which is just labels over AWS. Or Bitcoin converging on a shrinking number of pools.

woojoo666• 4 years ago

Decentralization of resources is different from decentralization of ownership. What web3 is pushing for is decentralization of ownership. So even if people are using AWS, they still have control over what they run.

Now Hetzner might be trying to undermine this by identifying and shutting down Eth nodes on their servers. But I imagine the next step for Web3 would be to make it harder to identify these nodes.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I don't have much to say about Hetzner or ETH, but I feel like there may be some similar minds reading this thread, so here goes..

This is a thought experiment:

hypothetical scenario, pretend our fictitious p2p network is in a vacuum and all peers are speaking over ipv4.

How would it affect peer diversity if each peer refused to add an other remote peer that shares any of its IP octets? Obviously ip6 would break this to an extent. What if there were other stipulations, for example where nodes will not peer-exchange with a peer that is under X latency, or sharing any octets, or under N number of hops, rejecting signs of being geo-proximal?

Kademlia, Tapestry and other p2p schemes don't really address this as much as one might hope to. I know the practice of maintaining node diversity/non-diversity is there in the industry, but it seems as a practice to have faded out when the last of the good malware and p2p devs retired.

LanternLight83• 4 years ago

Love this; Another factor could be peer latency.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

You know anybody looking to flesh it out into an idea?

nullc• 4 years ago

Bitcoin doesn't make outbound connections to multiple hosts sharing a /16 (there is some analogous prefix for IPv6 but I don't recall what it is).

If you provide it with a file containing a prefix trie that maps IPs to ASNs (or "enclosing ASN"-- e.g. merging any non-multihomed AS into its parent) then it won't make multiple outbound connections to the same ASN. There was some aspirations at some point of shipping a map file with the software, but I think the people working on that stopped working on Bitcoin.

Gold standard would be if you were multihomed yourself, constructing such a map from your own routing tables that collapsed every ASN into its distinct parent such that no outbound peers share a common network at all. (Bitcoin nodes don't make many outbound connections, so this wouldn't be totally crazy). Though that would still be a little approximate because there is no guarantee that interdomain routing is symmetrical.

10% of Ethereum nodes at risk of being booted from Hetzner

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