On August 26, Hetzner – a cloud computing service provider announced that it does not allow users to use its products. This company currently supports more than 10% of Ethereum nodes.
In a Reddit post on August 23, the company confirmed that the platform will ban users from using resources for crypto-related activities, including trading, mining, and staking.
Node is a network of computers that help operate the blockchain through data storage and exchange. This is also considered an important foundation to help create and maintain the operation of the blockchain based on the principle of P2P (peer to peer).
Ethereum is the second largest coin by market capitalization and is operated on a decentralized blockchain. Anyone can set up a node to contribute and participate in running the network.
In fact, many participants running nodes on Ethereum have used the services of a cloud provider to host their nodes. According to data from Ethernodes.org, almost 62% of the nodes on this blockchain operate through a cloud computing service such as Amazon. Of those nodes, about 14% are using Hetzner technology. As such, the Germany-based company now hosts more than 10% of Ethereum nodes.
This news has caused a stir in the community since W3bcloud co-founder Maggie Love lamented in a Twitter post. Love thinks that Ethereum lacks decentralization because it relies too much on cloud computing services. For example, Amazon accounts for about 50% of all Ethereum nodes hosted. Shortly after, Hetzner commented under the tweet with a link to the post on Reddit.
In the post, the company said that its service will not allow users to use it in crypto-related activities, including Ethereum.
“Using our products for any application related to crypto mining is not allowed. This includes Ethereum.”
“We know that a lot of Ethereum users are using Hetzner resources. We discussed how to best solve this problem,” said Hetzner.
In general, many users running nodes on Ethereum are heavily dependent on cloud computing services. This is probably also one of the major weaknesses of this blockchain.
Source: MarginATM