Quote from: achow101 on September 06, 2018, 02:23:03 PM

Quote from: Stedsm on September 06, 2018, 12:32:36 PM

Quote from: gmaxwell on September 05, 2018, 07:35:04 AM

Paying someone to run nodes (or running one yourself on a third party controlled VPS service like amazon or digital ocean, for that matter) wouldn't serve much of a purpose.

I don't understand why? Amazon or any digital third party doesn't do it on their consent, nor do they do it for their convenience but it's us who do it (or can do it) and we can use VPN services to stop being watched by them that we are doing this, that too anonymously, and as well, is there anything illegal in doing like this?

There's nothing illegal about it. There is just no real benefit to the network if many or all nodes are running on VPS services like AWS. All of those nodes are using the same block of IP addresses. They are likely hosted in the same data centers, so they are centralized in both the same digital region (IP address blocks) and the same physical region (datacenter location). Furthermore, if Amazon or DIgitalOcean decided that they didn't want people running Bitcoin nodes on their VPSes, they could shut down those VPSes and take off a large portion of the network. Thus having many nodes on VPSes with the same VPS providers does not really contribute to the decentralization of the network and is similar to just one node being run.

Plus running a node in "the cloud" is running it in someone else's computer, not the hardware that you control and manage. Technically you are not verifying and relaying anything in the network.