I was poking around a friends NXT client today and saw lots of NXT nodes running on centralized VPS servers.
I thought a decentralised network had nodes on different internet service providers, in different cities, and under control of different operators. That would discourage DDOS attacks, offer more route timing options, and handle data center upset.
But, the concentrated VPS nodes I see running NXT (like node19.mynxt.info and node70.nxtbase.com) mislead users into thinking the network is more protected than it really is.
It looks like HALF the NXT nodes are VPS ones. This tells me something about the lack of popularity of the system or somebody is trying to hide something?
nxtbase was a crowdsourced project to put up 100 nodes in a 10 data centers. Other folks raised NXT to put up their VPS nodes. Bounties/donations/sponsorships came from the whole community.
Given that not every user of NXT has the skills/manage to their own, it was a very smart way for the community to bootstrap and protect the network in a decentralized way for a POS system.
For those with skill to automate, managing 100 nodes is marginally more difficult than 1.
somebody is trying to hide something?
No need for trolling. If you spend a few minutes looking at archives from December, the entire process was transparent and a nice example of how to solve common infrastructure in a decentralized manner.
