14 ms·

Blockchains by number of nodes/validators

163 points by donmezgel 4y ago

jollybean 4y ago
The term 'market cap' has utterly no meaning in the context of crypto, it's made up noise to justify the meme.
coconut08 4y ago
Wait isn't each collection of 32 eth considered a separate validator no matter the source? If that's the case then wouldn't that mean that coinbase and other exchanges make up the massive overwhelming majority of those validators? If that's the case is it really good faith to claim that there are 400+ thousand validators and then arbitrarily put ethereum in first place?
- rvz 4y ago
  1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. It is not in good faith.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joyfylbanana 4y ago
  The point is the shilling as always
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  At a minimum I would group PoW and PoS coins separately, as the incentives for each category are quite different. This site acknowledges that in a way with separate lists at the top for "nodes" and "validators", but underneath they still have the main list sorted by max(apples, oranges)
- Taek 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728
      - nl 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        > 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.
- DennisP 4y ago
  More detailed stats on Ethereum validators are here: https://dune.com/hildobby/ETH2-Deposits https://dune.com/hildobby/ETH2-Deposits 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 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.
bitcurious 4y ago
Chia is famously decentralized when using “number of nodes” as the measure and yet is missing from this list.
- 1024wq 4y ago
  Chia currently has 123398 full nodes https://dashboard.chia.net/d/em15uQ47k/peer-info?orgId=1 https://dashboard.chia.net/d/em15uQ47k/peer-info?orgId=1
  - dbv1 4y ago
    Massive premine on Chia, didn’t know that. I have a hard time believing that many nodes are reachable, there are probably about that many users in general, if that. Looking at the latest dozen blocks right now, they’re completely empty.
    - mjmj 4y ago
      Their software runs a full node and a wallet, so most users are a node by default (if I’m not mistaken) and rewards are double for the first couple years. You can run their software and just about anything, low powered CPU’s, pi’s, NAS, etc. So I don’t doubt their numbers are too far from the truth, esp considering how much China supports them. Nodes have been slowly dropping over time as the crypto boom cycle has died down. As far as real transactions, they’ve got a way to go. Just releasing NFT support a few months ago.
      - 1024qw 4y ago
        In the beginning everyone had to run a full node even if they weren’t farming (in Chia instead of mining it’s 2 stages, first plotting and then farming) but earlier this year Chia released a new light wallet which doesn’t run a full node. Now it should be mostly actual farmers that run full nodes. Chia currently has 22 EiB of netspace which would be more than 1.5 million of 14 TB hard drives.
        4y ago
ollybee 4y ago
I think Goodhart's Law will kick in pretty quickly
- system2 4y ago
  Likely only HN would care about the node number so I don't see a problem.
- Taek 4y ago
  It's been in effect for this metric since the block size wars of 2016. Node count (and also validator count) has not been useful for a very long time.
nr152522 4y ago
Chia is missing from this list.
Cypher 4y ago
You can rank it however you want. The problem with nodes is that anyone can them up cheaply without having any impact on the security of the network.
literallyWTF 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (No, that's not a defense of cryptocurrency - just of HN comment quality, which may not be great to begin with, but which accounts like this destroy.)
  - literallyWTF 4y ago
    Your requests to stop? That’s news to me. But yeah, sure whatever. “Not a defense of crypto”.
    - dang 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227255 (Feb 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545243 (Dec 2021) Re "not a defense" - I realize it's hard to believe; you kind of have to go through the experience. But I don't have the energy to care about what people are arguing anymore, especially not on the most worn topics.
- colinsane 4y ago
- SirLJ 4y ago
  Aces!
- cmroanirgo 4y ago
  What is valuable to one person may not be to another. Does that make it a scam? Most people are adamant that gold is a fundamental unit of value, and yet it's paper value (by volume) is 10x the real thing¹. Does that make gold a scam? Personally, I'm much more interested in the value inherent in the Human Spirit, but others place almost no value on human life. Insurance companies place a dollar value on human life. I look at words like human resources and see how it collectivises individuals and turns them into cattle, putting a dollar value on something I think is priceless. People addicted to power are really interested in how many people they can control. Using this metric, managers, ceo's, etc are all buying into the scam that people have value but they're worth less than themselves. Using this metric any job is a scam, & it rides on the back of the notion that a piece of paper with $100 marked on it, formerly backed by gold, is actually worth anything. ¹ https://intelligent-partnership.com/paper-gold-volumes-vs-physical-gold-volumes/ https://intelligent-partnership.com/paper-gold-volumes-vs-ph...
saurik 4y ago
I would claim that would be just as bad if not even worse, as the biggest sin in the marketing of cryptocurrencies is that people create a circular value pump that starts with VC money to subsidize "rewards" for people running nodes and then they claim "we already have hundreds of nodes!!" which causes the value of their token to go up... which then means they have more value to continue providing subsidies. These rewards are paid out using the token, and to run a node--and thereby earn rewards--you have to "lock up" (aka, commit to not selling in the near future) a bunch of the token, which means people like to "reinvest" their rewards (to earn more rewards, which they mentally be model as an APY on their capital) rather than converting it immediately back into another currency. This causes a massive--and very unsustainable--"pump" in the value of the token, as more people rush to invest in the token so they can get paid rewards by staking it (to set up more nodes and earn more rewards), which is then used to market the product saying "look how many more nodes we have! we keep getting more and more nodes!" causing others to rush to invest in the token to speculate on the value increase, which adds up to the value of the token going up and thereby either the value of the treasury held by the company going up or the value that can be extracted via inflation going up, which can then be used to pay for more rewards. The ONLY correct metric by which to judge a cryptocurrency project is by the amount of legitimate--not "I am going to subsidize our nodes by acting as a client and using the network a ton randomly to make it look like there is a lot of usage"... which, yes, means this is a difficult metric to correctly measure--traffic, as probably measured by revenue (but maybe "untainted income" or something would work? I have stared at the question some but never managed to figure out what the best exact figure is... which is of course even harder of a problem than valuing a normal stock/company). To draw an analogy: would you want to decide the value of a restaurant chain by the number of locations they have around the world--or a gig economy company by the number of people providing service--if you knew the company took a billion dollars in VC money and could quite literally just be paying people to set up locations or drive in circles without a single user in sight? You'd want to know how much people were actually willing to pay for the food people are buying or how much they are willing to pay for the rides they are getting, and if that answer were somehow not only $0 but NEGATIVE--as cryptocurrencies often set up unsustainable VC/pump-funded incentives focused on the USER as well!!--you'd hopefully be skeptical of the company. (But, of course, I use those examples to explicitly include the ilk of Uber or DoorDash, as the question for SOME of these cryptocurrencies is "if we can get enough providers in enough places, only then can we unlock revenue and value". But that is then more of a progress check on their ability to build out their network as opposed to a real understanding of whether their product has any value or not... an ecosystem where you have a ton of supply and almost no actual demand is not an ecosystem which is functioning or one which will be sustainable.)
dangero 4y ago
You can run a thousand nodes virtually from a single pc
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
O__________O 4y ago
Anyone able to comment on why Bitcoin nodes started using TOR around January 2020? https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/7y/ https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/7y/
- _1tan 4y ago
  I assume because projects like Umbrel started around that time, made it simple to host and use To by default.
otikik 4y ago
Geee 4y ago
I think this is misleading, because every 32 eth stake is considered a validator. If you look at the top depositors by entity, you see that there are just a few entities controlling most of the stake, i.e. there's only a few validator nodes with most of the stake: https://etherscan.io/dashboards/beacon-depositors https://etherscan.io/dashboards/beacon-depositors Also, the number of nodes doesn't actually matter that much. It's more important that people can run nodes.
loxias 4y ago
Always surprised at how few nodes there are relative to how loud the noise is about crypto. I don't mind deploying a service and running things myself, it seems there are only a few thousand of us in the world. Even Tor only has "a few thousand" nodes. It might be cute to also see some derived statistics like "market cap/node", average size of transaction, and "estimated cost of 51% attack". ;-)
- mrsnowman123 4y ago
  [dead]
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  It’s surprisingly complex to run a node unless you’re a seasoned developer, and even then when you add things like updates and potentially even slashing for mistakes it’s not worth it. I spent around two years contracting building test infra for different crypto companies by creating throwaway networks with potentially up to three different cryptos (for bridges) and it was a nightmare. There’s a definite startup idea there to make it easier like spinning up VMs
  - c0mptonFP 4y ago
    Compared to the shit sysadmins normally have to deal with, setting up nodes and spinning up custom nets is a breeze in recent years.
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  > estimated cost of 51% attack Someone already built that one here: https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
  - password1 4y ago
    These numbers are really low, I think I'm missing something otherwise I don't understand why 51% aren't a common issue.
dskloet 4y ago
Where does this get its data? Dash has close to 4,000 nodes but here it's listed with 27.
- donmezgel 4y ago
  It's from active connections here: https://explorer.dash.org/insight-api/status https://explorer.dash.org/insight-api/status
  - dskloet 4y ago
    Why would one assume that an explorer has connections to every node in the network?
    - donmezgel 4y ago
      So where did you get 4000 number?
mjmj 4y ago
Where is Chia? They might out rank all of these.
- avnfish 4y ago
  Was just about to say the same. Chia is at 123k full nodes. Source: https://dashboard.chia.net/ https://dashboard.chia.net/
  - guilhas 4y ago
    If you google Chia launch it says it started with more than 100k nodes already If you zoom out that dashboard it says at one point 200k nodes that than very sudden changes but in a general trend downwards. Data might not be accurate I don't understand much of Chia or other coins, but it does not look very organic
- donmezgel 4y ago
  Couldn't find their api to get the numbers..
  - sigmar 4y ago
    https://www.chia.net/2022/04/06/announcing-chia-dashboards.en.html https://www.chia.net/2022/04/06/announcing-chia-dashboards.e...
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Good question, how many gigatons of e-waste have they generated now?
jgarzik 4y ago
Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complicates the number-of-nodes use as a simple metric and useful comparator.
- mbesto 4y ago
  Answer (0 yr crypto dev & veteran): I start a new coin call $FOO. I release 1,000,000 coins. I sell one coin to a friend for $1,0000, and keep the remaining 999,999 coins for myself. The market cap is now $100M. > Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. You can game either one.
  - mgraczyk 4y ago
    If there's a public order book, it's very easy to see through this. Harder to do that with nodes.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      And yet so many instances of crypto coins that did this. I’m pretty sure they all had public books. The challenge isn’t I sell one coin. It’s wash trading. You create sufficient volume from multiple different anonymous accounts continuously. That’s impossible to decipher because ownership is impossible to untangle.
      - mgraczyk 4y ago
        This only works if the exchange is in on it. That has happened many times but it's much harder to do than faking node activity.
        4y ago
ChainOfFools 4y ago
Number of nodes always and necessarily > number of people in control of those nodes, never the other way around. Node count is an extremely cheap pseudo-signal that implies decentralization of control, but is in no way correlated with it.
avnigo 4y ago
Another question is what percentage of those is hosted on AWS?
- ahtihn 4y ago
  Why is that question relevant?
  - AustinDev 4y ago
    Single point of failure well not single but we've seen AWS disrupted across many regions before.
  - jfghi 4y ago
    Relevant I’d say because AWS can ban anyone, any time, for any reason
  - primeblue 4y ago
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Because Hetzner has banned cryptocurrency nodes and AWS could do the same.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  For Eth validators, most of them will be in AWS or similar.
  - TheDudeMan 4y ago
    More generally: PoS will be on AWS or similar. PoW and PoST will not be on AWS or similar.
soulofmischief 4y ago
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
dakial1 4y ago
Newbie question, how do you know how many nodes are under the same entity, to avoid somebody compromising the distributed system?
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  You can't, that's why miners vote with their computing power (or their staked coins in PoS) instead of the number of nodes. The second metric is gameable by spinning up many nodes (Sybil attack).
swivelmaster 4y ago
Can someone explain to me why any of these values truly matter? My background is in game development both on Facebook and mobile, and I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the growth of the web and its various startups. Number of nodes and market cap both look a lot like vanity metrics to me - numbers that sound good in a market/tech-specific way but don't actually reflect the true value or growth potential from a business perspective. Cryptocurrency, AFAIK, has network effects, so the true value should likely be measured in common KPI's like DAU, MAU, and some kind of replacement for ARPU - likely average transaction volume per daily/monthly user. The numbers I've seen for crypto games - DAU in the tens of thousands - are absolutely laughable compared to the numbers on Facebook and mobile games even in the first year or two of the platforms. If crypto was truly going to be a revolutionary mass-market phenomenon, I would expect to see hundreds of thousands to millions of DAU on any individual currency and AFAIK that's just not happening.
- cowtools 4y ago
  The number of nodes doesn't really matter as long as it's sufficiently high. The network security is mostly based on how decentralized the hash-power is (or staking-power) is. You're right that better measures are number of transactions-per-second, merchant acceptance, etc: https://mempool.space/lightning https://mempool.space/lightning https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-ltc-bch-etc-xrp-doge-xmr-zec-dash.html#3y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-lt... https://moneroj.net/merchants/ https://moneroj.net/merchants/ I agree that crypto games have been pretty pitiful in their current incarnation, outside of gambling applications (thanks to provable fairness). They have a bad reputation of being too centralized and pay-to-win, which is really the only problem cryptocurrency is supposed to solve.
- rhodorhoades 4y ago
  Because crypto is banned on every meaningful platform. I can’t use my phone to mine, I can’t use defi on IOS or android. In the US I can’t access shorting on CEX, am not allowed to use tornado cash to gain privacy, I am platform locked everywhere I go and yet crypto hangs on the fringe. Crypto is heavily censored in the US from multiple directions.
globalreset 4y ago
Ethereum "validators" are just an address with 32ETH. They are nothing like a separate "node".
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
I think cryptocurrencies should be ranked by the mass in kilograms of the actual, real, physical products and the weight of people performing actual, real, services that have been paid for using them. Arbitrage and exchange, and all of the people and infrastructure surrounding those, would have no mass in this ranking system. "What about online stuff?" Well, yeah. If you pay for a small instance VPS using bitcoin then you get credit for 1/64th of the weight of that PowerEdge R7525 you're renting and the 375 lbs dev you hired to run your site. Unless it's an exchange or trading platform, of course.
- fallat 4y ago
  Pretty much this in a vague way. Obviously not exactly as the comment is written, but yes, it should be measured in the actual usage of the tokens.
  - redox99 4y ago
    One decent metric are the fees[1]. Basically how much money people are actually spending to use the cryptocurrency. Raw usage (as in number of transactions) is meaningless because it can be trivially manipulated by wash trading if the fees are super low (typical of a barely used chain). [1] https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
- cowtools 4y ago
  It's a pretty funny idea, but I have a pretty good idea of how it would end up: "Yes, I would like to purchase a thousand stone bricks. Do you accept BrickCoin?"
- hinkley 4y ago
  GDP?
rabf 4y ago
Crypto fees is an interesting website which aims to show which chains and dapps people are paying to use. https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
daniel-cussen 4y ago
So in fact market cap was the reason Satoshi Nakamura I divine ended up immolating in 2015, like Lycurgus of Sparta who founded Sparta said don't change the laws until I return, left and starved himself to death, and the laws never changed. Went very well for Sparta. Similar concept of unchanging laws of high integrity in the case of Bitcoin, it was about getting them right from the beginning. Same problem, bad for integrity for the founder to stick around because he can lead, the goal is for the system to be beyond appeal, airtight. Like it worked out way too well by 2015 and too poorly at the beginning, he thought he would get traction right away (hence the second block taking like a week, this indicates it's the first thing he released) but it didn't. Overshot the difficulty. So he was stuck pre-mining until he again selflessly stopped mining, he could have mined more. And he was an all-around cryptographer, so very very paranoid (job requirement) very hidden, Bitcoin wasn't the only code he wrote I divine the only code he published, similar to the Truecrypt author, went by alias John Smith that guy, who is getting out of prison for murders based on his code, in like five years. That's one alternate universe of Satoshi.
aptenodyte 4y ago
They didnt include NKN which has a lot of nodes
- donmezgel 4y ago
  It says on their website: "Our economic model consists of two kinds of users: The ones who want to use the benefits of NKN, and the ones who create them." So how many of 32k nodes are actually the ones that create NKN?
  - aptenodyte 4y ago
    NKN pays people for forwarding messages, so hard to distinguish use from creation
rufusroflpunch 4y ago
There is no way Bitcoin has only 11k nodes. There are currently 17k public Lightning nodes, so there must be at least that many full nodes, and certainly many many more.
onion-soup 4y ago
Nodes mine blocks. Therefore there all those nodes people call nodes are not nodes.
arcticbull 4y ago
Market capitalization of a currency is not a defined quality. That's a quality of an equity. You measure market cap in a currency, you do not measure the currency in terms of market cap. Currencies only have supply, velocity and exchange rates. There's no market cap of USD. There's only the supply. It's value is derived from how much you can reasonably anticipate exchanging one USD for in an economy. Fundamentally that requires goods and services to be priced in USD so that you can derive a value for the dollar from a basket of goods and services. But nothing is priced in BTC, it's priced in local currencies and converted in real-time at the point of a transaction since generally speaking you can't exchange BTC for anything directly, cost of inputs is determined local currency and taxes are due in local currency at the spot price at the time of the transaction. This is an aspect of the holy trinity of crypto where it's all things to all people. It's not a currency, it's a high-beta speculative play on US dollar liquidity in the market as determined by the Federal Reserve. Nodes are gameable, market cap is gamed for sure. The only way to more forward quantitatively is to actually treat BTC for what it is. That's why none of these definitions fit. If you want to treat it as a currency compute its GDP, which is supply times velocity converted at spot to international dollars.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
i still don't really understand why BTC is worth 20k, and ETH 1.5k (today) aside from the idea that this is how much people are willing to pay. what was really the catalyst for this, my gut feeling is circa 2018 tether money printing and chinese money flight
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  ELI5: they are databases where writing costs a payment in that database’s token people write to it ELI16: they are public utility state machines that people pay to use, there are other metrics sites that show what people are willing to pay for. in many cases, the payments themselves make the token more scarce permanently, and anyone needing to make payments in the future has to buy it as a higher price from someone else. There is a lot of activity on the Ethereum network. so despite the more familiarity with speculation, there are many users that acquire the cryptocurrencies as short term inventory when needed to perform state operations
nullc 4y ago
Not a good sign that it gets bitcoin wrong by a factor of 5-ish: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwa... and then places at #2 because it erroneously just divides the ethereum stakable supply up by 32 and counts that as 'validators' when it's really just a small number of entities. That would be like claiming that bitcoin has some number of trillion 'validators' because it performs that many sha256 operations per unit time, or counting each 1e-8 btc as a 'validator' because anyone that owns bitcoin at all is incentivized to validate and protect the network or other such meaningless metric.
Crystalin 4y ago
It would require to be more accurate. Talking about my blockchain Moonbeam, it should "at least" use https://moonbeam.subscan.io/validator https://moonbeam.subscan.io/validator and not our testnet :p Also the number of nodes can be seem there: https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/0xfe58ea77779b7abda7da4ec526d14db9b1e9cd40a217c34892af80a9b332b76d https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/0xfe58ea77779b7abda7da4e...

163 points by donmezgel 4y ago

The term 'market cap' has utterly no meaning in the context of crypto, it's made up noise to justify the meme.

Wait isn't each collection of 32 eth considered a separate validator no matter the source? If that's the case then wouldn't that mean that coinbase and other exchanges make up the massive overwhelming majority of those validators? If that's the case is it really good faith to claim that there are 400+ thousand validators and then arbitrarily put ethereum in first place?

rvz 4y ago
1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. It is not in good faith.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
joyfylbanana 4y ago
The point is the shilling as always
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
At a minimum I would group PoW and PoS coins separately, as the incentives for each category are quite different. This site acknowledges that in a way with separate lists at the top for "nodes" and "validators", but underneath they still have the main list sorted by max(apples, oranges)
Taek 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607728
    - nl 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        > 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.
DennisP 4y ago
More detailed stats on Ethereum validators are here: https://dune.com/hildobby/ETH2-Deposits https://dune.com/hildobby/ETH2-Deposits 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 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.

bitcurious 4y ago

Chia is famously decentralized when using “number of nodes” as the measure and yet is missing from this list.

1024wq 4y ago
Chia currently has 123398 full nodes https://dashboard.chia.net/d/em15uQ47k/peer-info?orgId=1 https://dashboard.chia.net/d/em15uQ47k/peer-info?orgId=1
- dbv1 4y ago
  Massive premine on Chia, didn’t know that. I have a hard time believing that many nodes are reachable, there are probably about that many users in general, if that. Looking at the latest dozen blocks right now, they’re completely empty.
  - mjmj 4y ago
    Their software runs a full node and a wallet, so most users are a node by default (if I’m not mistaken) and rewards are double for the first couple years. You can run their software and just about anything, low powered CPU’s, pi’s, NAS, etc. So I don’t doubt their numbers are too far from the truth, esp considering how much China supports them. Nodes have been slowly dropping over time as the crypto boom cycle has died down. As far as real transactions, they’ve got a way to go. Just releasing NFT support a few months ago.
    - 1024qw 4y ago
      In the beginning everyone had to run a full node even if they weren’t farming (in Chia instead of mining it’s 2 stages, first plotting and then farming) but earlier this year Chia released a new light wallet which doesn’t run a full node. Now it should be mostly actual farmers that run full nodes. Chia currently has 22 EiB of netspace which would be more than 1.5 million of 14 TB hard drives.
      - 4y ago

ollybee 4y ago

I think Goodhart's Law will kick in pretty quickly

system2 4y ago
Likely only HN would care about the node number so I don't see a problem.
Taek 4y ago
It's been in effect for this metric since the block size wars of 2016. Node count (and also validator count) has not been useful for a very long time.

nr152522 4y ago

Chia is missing from this list.

Cypher 4y ago

You can rank it however you want. The problem with nodes is that anyone can them up cheaply without having any impact on the security of the network.

literallyWTF 4y ago

dang 4y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (No, that's not a defense of cryptocurrency - just of HN comment quality, which may not be great to begin with, but which accounts like this destroy.)
- literallyWTF 4y ago
  Your requests to stop? That’s news to me. But yeah, sure whatever. “Not a defense of crypto”.
  - dang 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227255 (Feb 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29545243 (Dec 2021) Re "not a defense" - I realize it's hard to believe; you kind of have to go through the experience. But I don't have the energy to care about what people are arguing anymore, especially not on the most worn topics.
colinsane 4y ago
SirLJ 4y ago
Aces!
cmroanirgo 4y ago
What is valuable to one person may not be to another. Does that make it a scam? Most people are adamant that gold is a fundamental unit of value, and yet it's paper value (by volume) is 10x the real thing¹. Does that make gold a scam? Personally, I'm much more interested in the value inherent in the Human Spirit, but others place almost no value on human life. Insurance companies place a dollar value on human life. I look at words like human resources and see how it collectivises individuals and turns them into cattle, putting a dollar value on something I think is priceless. People addicted to power are really interested in how many people they can control. Using this metric, managers, ceo's, etc are all buying into the scam that people have value but they're worth less than themselves. Using this metric any job is a scam, & it rides on the back of the notion that a piece of paper with $100 marked on it, formerly backed by gold, is actually worth anything. ¹ https://intelligent-partnership.com/paper-gold-volumes-vs-physical-gold-volumes/ https://intelligent-partnership.com/paper-gold-volumes-vs-ph...

saurik 4y ago

I would claim that would be just as bad if not even worse, as the biggest sin in the marketing of cryptocurrencies is that people create a circular value pump that starts with VC money to subsidize "rewards" for people running nodes and then they claim "we already have hundreds of nodes!!" which causes the value of their token to go up... which then means they have more value to continue providing subsidies. These rewards are paid out using the token, and to run a node--and thereby earn rewards--you have to "lock up" (aka, commit to not selling in the near future) a bunch of the token, which means people like to "reinvest" their rewards (to earn more rewards, which they mentally be model as an APY on their capital) rather than converting it immediately back into another currency. This causes a massive--and very unsustainable--"pump" in the value of the token, as more people rush to invest in the token so they can get paid rewards by staking it (to set up more nodes and earn more rewards), which is then used to market the product saying "look how many more nodes we have! we keep getting more and more nodes!" causing others to rush to invest in the token to speculate on the value increase, which adds up to the value of the token going up and thereby either the value of the treasury held by the company going up or the value that can be extracted via inflation going up, which can then be used to pay for more rewards. The ONLY correct metric by which to judge a cryptocurrency project is by the amount of legitimate--not "I am going to subsidize our nodes by acting as a client and using the network a ton randomly to make it look like there is a lot of usage"... which, yes, means this is a difficult metric to correctly measure--traffic, as probably measured by revenue (but maybe "untainted income" or something would work? I have stared at the question some but never managed to figure out what the best exact figure is... which is of course even harder of a problem than valuing a normal stock/company). To draw an analogy: would you want to decide the value of a restaurant chain by the number of locations they have around the world--or a gig economy company by the number of people providing service--if you knew the company took a billion dollars in VC money and could quite literally just be paying people to set up locations or drive in circles without a single user in sight? You'd want to know how much people were actually willing to pay for the food people are buying or how much they are willing to pay for the rides they are getting, and if that answer were somehow not only $0 but NEGATIVE--as cryptocurrencies often set up unsustainable VC/pump-funded incentives focused on the USER as well!!--you'd hopefully be skeptical of the company. (But, of course, I use those examples to explicitly include the ilk of Uber or DoorDash, as the question for SOME of these cryptocurrencies is "if we can get enough providers in enough places, only then can we unlock revenue and value". But that is then more of a progress check on their ability to build out their network as opposed to a real understanding of whether their product has any value or not... an ecosystem where you have a ton of supply and almost no actual demand is not an ecosystem which is functioning or one which will be sustainable.)

dangero 4y ago

You can run a thousand nodes virtually from a single pc

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

O__________O 4y ago

Anyone able to comment on why Bitcoin nodes started using TOR around January 2020? https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/7y/ https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/7y/

_1tan 4y ago
I assume because projects like Umbrel started around that time, made it simple to host and use To by default.

otikik 4y ago

Geee 4y ago

I think this is misleading, because every 32 eth stake is considered a validator. If you look at the top depositors by entity, you see that there are just a few entities controlling most of the stake, i.e. there's only a few validator nodes with most of the stake: https://etherscan.io/dashboards/beacon-depositors https://etherscan.io/dashboards/beacon-depositors Also, the number of nodes doesn't actually matter that much. It's more important that people can run nodes.

loxias 4y ago

Always surprised at how few nodes there are relative to how loud the noise is about crypto. I don't mind deploying a service and running things myself, it seems there are only a few thousand of us in the world. Even Tor only has "a few thousand" nodes. It might be cute to also see some derived statistics like "market cap/node", average size of transaction, and "estimated cost of 51% attack". ;-)

mrsnowman123 4y ago
[dead]
EddySchauHai 4y ago
It’s surprisingly complex to run a node unless you’re a seasoned developer, and even then when you add things like updates and potentially even slashing for mistakes it’s not worth it. I spent around two years contracting building test infra for different crypto companies by creating throwaway networks with potentially up to three different cryptos (for bridges) and it was a nightmare. There’s a definite startup idea there to make it easier like spinning up VMs
- c0mptonFP 4y ago
  Compared to the shit sysadmins normally have to deal with, setting up nodes and spinning up custom nets is a breeze in recent years.
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
> estimated cost of 51% attack Someone already built that one here: https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
- password1 4y ago
  These numbers are really low, I think I'm missing something otherwise I don't understand why 51% aren't a common issue.

dskloet 4y ago

Where does this get its data? Dash has close to 4,000 nodes but here it's listed with 27.

donmezgel 4y ago
It's from active connections here: https://explorer.dash.org/insight-api/status https://explorer.dash.org/insight-api/status
- dskloet 4y ago
  Why would one assume that an explorer has connections to every node in the network?
  - donmezgel 4y ago
    So where did you get 4000 number?

mjmj 4y ago

Where is Chia? They might out rank all of these.

avnfish 4y ago
Was just about to say the same. Chia is at 123k full nodes. Source: https://dashboard.chia.net/ https://dashboard.chia.net/
- guilhas 4y ago
  If you google Chia launch it says it started with more than 100k nodes already If you zoom out that dashboard it says at one point 200k nodes that than very sudden changes but in a general trend downwards. Data might not be accurate I don't understand much of Chia or other coins, but it does not look very organic
donmezgel 4y ago
Couldn't find their api to get the numbers..
- sigmar 4y ago
  https://www.chia.net/2022/04/06/announcing-chia-dashboards.en.html https://www.chia.net/2022/04/06/announcing-chia-dashboards.e...
arcticbull 4y ago
Good question, how many gigatons of e-waste have they generated now?

jgarzik 4y ago

Answer (12 yr crypto dev & veteran): Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. If a blockchain's economics purposefully incentivizes nodes, then number-of-nodes is entirely subsidized, in one common example. Further, the "Sybil" factor - which one party controls many nodes - and other centralizing factors - e.g. 90% of nodes are on Big Cloud - also complicates the number-of-nodes use as a simple metric and useful comparator.

mbesto 4y ago
Answer (0 yr crypto dev & veteran): I start a new coin call $FOO. I release 1,000,000 coins. I sell one coin to a friend for $1,0000, and keep the remaining 999,999 coins for myself. The market cap is now $100M. > Number of nodes is a poor metric that is easily gamified (pumped up), presenting an artificial picture. You can game either one.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  If there's a public order book, it's very easy to see through this. Harder to do that with nodes.
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    And yet so many instances of crypto coins that did this. I’m pretty sure they all had public books. The challenge isn’t I sell one coin. It’s wash trading. You create sufficient volume from multiple different anonymous accounts continuously. That’s impossible to decipher because ownership is impossible to untangle.
    - mgraczyk 4y ago
      This only works if the exchange is in on it. That has happened many times but it's much harder to do than faking node activity.
      - 4y ago

ChainOfFools 4y ago

Number of nodes always and necessarily > number of people in control of those nodes, never the other way around. Node count is an extremely cheap pseudo-signal that implies decentralization of control, but is in no way correlated with it.

avnigo 4y ago

Another question is what percentage of those is hosted on AWS?

ahtihn 4y ago
Why is that question relevant?
- AustinDev 4y ago
  Single point of failure well not single but we've seen AWS disrupted across many regions before.
- jfghi 4y ago
  Relevant I’d say because AWS can ban anyone, any time, for any reason
- primeblue 4y ago
- imtringued 4y ago
  Because Hetzner has banned cryptocurrency nodes and AWS could do the same.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
For Eth validators, most of them will be in AWS or similar.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  More generally: PoS will be on AWS or similar. PoW and PoST will not be on AWS or similar.

soulofmischief 4y ago

> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

dakial1 4y ago

Newbie question, how do you know how many nodes are under the same entity, to avoid somebody compromising the distributed system?

drexlspivey 4y ago
You can't, that's why miners vote with their computing power (or their staked coins in PoS) instead of the number of nodes. The second metric is gameable by spinning up many nodes (Sybil attack).

swivelmaster 4y ago

Can someone explain to me why any of these values truly matter? My background is in game development both on Facebook and mobile, and I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the growth of the web and its various startups. Number of nodes and market cap both look a lot like vanity metrics to me - numbers that sound good in a market/tech-specific way but don't actually reflect the true value or growth potential from a business perspective. Cryptocurrency, AFAIK, has network effects, so the true value should likely be measured in common KPI's like DAU, MAU, and some kind of replacement for ARPU - likely average transaction volume per daily/monthly user. The numbers I've seen for crypto games - DAU in the tens of thousands - are absolutely laughable compared to the numbers on Facebook and mobile games even in the first year or two of the platforms. If crypto was truly going to be a revolutionary mass-market phenomenon, I would expect to see hundreds of thousands to millions of DAU on any individual currency and AFAIK that's just not happening.

cowtools 4y ago
The number of nodes doesn't really matter as long as it's sufficiently high. The network security is mostly based on how decentralized the hash-power is (or staking-power) is. You're right that better measures are number of transactions-per-second, merchant acceptance, etc: https://mempool.space/lightning https://mempool.space/lightning https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-ltc-bch-etc-xrp-doge-xmr-zec-dash.html#3y https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-lt... https://moneroj.net/merchants/ https://moneroj.net/merchants/ I agree that crypto games have been pretty pitiful in their current incarnation, outside of gambling applications (thanks to provable fairness). They have a bad reputation of being too centralized and pay-to-win, which is really the only problem cryptocurrency is supposed to solve.
rhodorhoades 4y ago
Because crypto is banned on every meaningful platform. I can’t use my phone to mine, I can’t use defi on IOS or android. In the US I can’t access shorting on CEX, am not allowed to use tornado cash to gain privacy, I am platform locked everywhere I go and yet crypto hangs on the fringe. Crypto is heavily censored in the US from multiple directions.

globalreset 4y ago

Ethereum "validators" are just an address with 32ETH. They are nothing like a separate "node".

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

I think cryptocurrencies should be ranked by the mass in kilograms of the actual, real, physical products and the weight of people performing actual, real, services that have been paid for using them. Arbitrage and exchange, and all of the people and infrastructure surrounding those, would have no mass in this ranking system. "What about online stuff?" Well, yeah. If you pay for a small instance VPS using bitcoin then you get credit for 1/64th of the weight of that PowerEdge R7525 you're renting and the 375 lbs dev you hired to run your site. Unless it's an exchange or trading platform, of course.

fallat 4y ago
Pretty much this in a vague way. Obviously not exactly as the comment is written, but yes, it should be measured in the actual usage of the tokens.
- redox99 4y ago
  One decent metric are the fees[1]. Basically how much money people are actually spending to use the cryptocurrency. Raw usage (as in number of transactions) is meaningless because it can be trivially manipulated by wash trading if the fees are super low (typical of a barely used chain). [1] https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/
cowtools 4y ago
It's a pretty funny idea, but I have a pretty good idea of how it would end up: "Yes, I would like to purchase a thousand stone bricks. Do you accept BrickCoin?"
hinkley 4y ago
GDP?

rabf 4y ago

Crypto fees is an interesting website which aims to show which chains and dapps people are paying to use. https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/

daniel-cussen 4y ago

So in fact market cap was the reason Satoshi Nakamura I divine ended up immolating in 2015, like Lycurgus of Sparta who founded Sparta said don't change the laws until I return, left and starved himself to death, and the laws never changed. Went very well for Sparta. Similar concept of unchanging laws of high integrity in the case of Bitcoin, it was about getting them right from the beginning. Same problem, bad for integrity for the founder to stick around because he can lead, the goal is for the system to be beyond appeal, airtight. Like it worked out way too well by 2015 and too poorly at the beginning, he thought he would get traction right away (hence the second block taking like a week, this indicates it's the first thing he released) but it didn't. Overshot the difficulty. So he was stuck pre-mining until he again selflessly stopped mining, he could have mined more. And he was an all-around cryptographer, so very very paranoid (job requirement) very hidden, Bitcoin wasn't the only code he wrote I divine the only code he published, similar to the Truecrypt author, went by alias John Smith that guy, who is getting out of prison for murders based on his code, in like five years. That's one alternate universe of Satoshi.

aptenodyte 4y ago

They didnt include NKN which has a lot of nodes

donmezgel 4y ago
It says on their website: "Our economic model consists of two kinds of users: The ones who want to use the benefits of NKN, and the ones who create them." So how many of 32k nodes are actually the ones that create NKN?
- aptenodyte 4y ago
  NKN pays people for forwarding messages, so hard to distinguish use from creation

rufusroflpunch 4y ago

There is no way Bitcoin has only 11k nodes. There are currently 17k public Lightning nodes, so there must be at least that many full nodes, and certainly many many more.

onion-soup 4y ago

Nodes mine blocks. Therefore there all those nodes people call nodes are not nodes.

arcticbull 4y ago

Market capitalization of a currency is not a defined quality. That's a quality of an equity. You measure market cap in a currency, you do not measure the currency in terms of market cap. Currencies only have supply, velocity and exchange rates. There's no market cap of USD. There's only the supply. It's value is derived from how much you can reasonably anticipate exchanging one USD for in an economy. Fundamentally that requires goods and services to be priced in USD so that you can derive a value for the dollar from a basket of goods and services. But nothing is priced in BTC, it's priced in local currencies and converted in real-time at the point of a transaction since generally speaking you can't exchange BTC for anything directly, cost of inputs is determined local currency and taxes are due in local currency at the spot price at the time of the transaction. This is an aspect of the holy trinity of crypto where it's all things to all people. It's not a currency, it's a high-beta speculative play on US dollar liquidity in the market as determined by the Federal Reserve. Nodes are gameable, market cap is gamed for sure. The only way to more forward quantitatively is to actually treat BTC for what it is. That's why none of these definitions fit. If you want to treat it as a currency compute its GDP, which is supply times velocity converted at spot to international dollars.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

i still don't really understand why BTC is worth 20k, and ETH 1.5k (today) aside from the idea that this is how much people are willing to pay. what was really the catalyst for this, my gut feeling is circa 2018 tether money printing and chinese money flight

yieldcrv 4y ago
ELI5: they are databases where writing costs a payment in that database’s token people write to it ELI16: they are public utility state machines that people pay to use, there are other metrics sites that show what people are willing to pay for. in many cases, the payments themselves make the token more scarce permanently, and anyone needing to make payments in the future has to buy it as a higher price from someone else. There is a lot of activity on the Ethereum network. so despite the more familiarity with speculation, there are many users that acquire the cryptocurrencies as short term inventory when needed to perform state operations

nullc 4y ago

Not a good sign that it gets bitcoin wrong by a factor of 5-ish: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwa... and then places at #2 because it erroneously just divides the ethereum stakable supply up by 32 and counts that as 'validators' when it's really just a small number of entities. That would be like claiming that bitcoin has some number of trillion 'validators' because it performs that many sha256 operations per unit time, or counting each 1e-8 btc as a 'validator' because anyone that owns bitcoin at all is incentivized to validate and protect the network or other such meaningless metric.

Crystalin 4y ago

It would require to be more accurate. Talking about my blockchain Moonbeam, it should "at least" use https://moonbeam.subscan.io/validator https://moonbeam.subscan.io/validator and not our testnet :p Also the number of nodes can be seem there: https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/0xfe58ea77779b7abda7da4ec526d14db9b1e9cd40a217c34892af80a9b332b76d https://telemetry.polkadot.io/#list/0xfe58ea77779b7abda7da4e...