Masternodes, VPS providers, authorities.

jpr

jpr

Well-known member
Hi
I was just wondering how strong we are when it comes to regulations and law.
What would happen and is it possible for authorities to try and stop or seize masternodes?
Let's say FBI says masternodes are being used to mix the coins used to buy drugs on dark markets. Can they force VPS providers to stop, freeze accounts with masternodes? I mean if a Vultr suddenly stops working we would loose like a few hundred masternodes at the same time. Same thing with other popular providers.
Aren't we like a bit centralized within a few providers? If for any reasons Vultr, DigitalOcean, AWS stops hosting our nodes because they were told to, we would probably loose most of our masternodes.
What you guys think about this?
 
Right now the providers can only find out masternode-activity by watching port 9999.

If everything else fails we could simply tunnel the masternode-traffic through https.
 
crowning said:
Right now the providers can only find out masternode-activity by watching port 9999.

If everything else fails we could simply tunnel the masternode-traffic through https.
Click to expand...
The providers (or any other person in the world) do not need to be watching port 9999 as they can call "darkcoind masternode list" to see all the masternodes ))) Tunneling through https would encrypt the traffic but would not hide the masternodes.
 
jpr said:
http://www.darkcoin.cm/index/charts/
On this site it says that 93% of all Masternodes are depending on 2 VPS providers. Amazon and Vultr.
Seriously guys? You don't see any danger here? Can someone please calm me down and explain why I should not bother with this? I'd really like to hear your opinion. vertoe flare oblox thelonecrouton
Click to expand...

Similar situation to people using the largest mining pools since that's where the hash is--you have people using these two providers because they tend to be cheap (or even free), for the most part, reliable, and finally, because you have guides that direct setup right on these particular VPS sites instead of educating people reading the guide to look elsewhere. I'm actually planning on moving mine after I burn through my credit.
 
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MN centralisation, while certainly something that needs to be addressed, is I think less of a problem than mining centralisation.

If MNs get taken down, it will either slow or halt use of DS and IX, but won't affect already anonymised coins, regular blockchain tx's, coin minting etc. It will be an annoyance as it might interrupt some services but not fatal, and quickly fixable by people setting up new MNs on different providers.

I've been asking on testnet at various points for some sort of more structured testing to establish just how badly DS (and in future IX) service would suffer given various ratios of users/MNs so we'd have a better idea of what we might face in the event of a mass outage on mainnet. Kind of difficult to organise that though, we're all volunteers from different timezones...

I have no idea how far along Evan is with the multipath thing, and MN identity obfuscation. That would certainly help in making MNs less trivial to identify and target.

Ideally if MNs could run some kind of DDNS-type service among themselves, it might also do away with the need for fixed IPs, and more people could run them from home, if they had a decent enough connection. I think that would greatly aid the decentralisation of them.
 
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jpr said:
Hi
I was just wondering how strong we are when it comes to regulations and law.
What would happen and is it possible for authorities to try and stop or seize masternodes?
Let's say FBI says masternodes are being used to mix the coins used to buy drugs on dark markets. Can they force VPS providers to stop, freeze accounts with masternodes? I mean if a Vultr suddenly stops working we would loose like a few hundred masternodes at the same time. Same thing with other popular providers.
Aren't we like a bit centralized within a few providers? If for any reasons Vultr, DigitalOcean, AWS stops hosting our nodes because they were told to, we would probably loose most of our masternodes.
What you guys think about this?
Click to expand...
That possibility is quite remote, but I agree it is not the best of scenarios.

A few months back I worked with a lawyer from a well known ngo (I can't disclose their name per their request, I'm sorry) to evaluate the risk and suggest to Evan some ideas in the design of the protocol to avoid this problem. The masternode operator can't really decipher what goes through his machine and he doesn't chose whose funds to mix, so the legal risk is negligible.

Also, both Amazon and Vultr are in the list of friendly ISPs towards people who are running Tor nodes. Those have had some legal troubles in the past, but legal agencies have understood that the ISP and node operator are not responsible and they are still ok.
 
Do you sue Smith & Wesson because some asshole decides to shoot up a school? Do you sue Ford because someone used a Taurus as a gettaway car from robbing a bank? No.
 
fernando said:
Also, both Amazon and Vultr are in the list of friendly ISPs towards people who are running Tor nodes. Those have had some legal troubles in the past, but legal agencies have understood that the ISP and node operator are not responsible and they are still ok.
Click to expand...

Tor has an advantage over Darkcoin, it's openly funded by the NSA - I would expect any legal action against it or its support infrastructure to be, ah, short lived. :eek:
 
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