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.
So? That doesn't mean anything, Amazon doesn't control the nodes just because they are running on its infra.
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.
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.
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 The same applies to any software you use - if a license can be withdrawn there is an element of control.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.
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
There's really not.
US gov or the CIA/fbi just forces AWS to do so.
Since Snowden not unreasonable.
Currently there are 79,717 distinct depositor addresses. They list 36 known entities validating, accounting for about 75% of staked ETH. So that leaves about 100K validators split among small unknown entities. Many of those would be home stakers.
Some of the known entities are staking pools, representing lots people who own the stake. But it's only the pool producing the blocks. Bitcoin is similar: lots of home miners but they're mostly in pools, not attempting to create blocks on their own.
For the number of entities creating Bitcoin blocks, I just found this paper, which doesn't give a total number but says 55 to 60 miners control at least half of Bitcoin mining: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181
I wouldn't expect the number of independent (i.e. unpooled) Bitcoin miners to be especially large, since a fairly large investment is required to have a chance of producing a block in a given year.