To become a world-wide well-spread network
• Current network situation I had my all 2 public sentries, 1 private sentry, 1 validator in aws Korea region. I started to participate from 7001 and today I reviewed my data communication and this was the data. data outbound to US 70%, Germany 15%, Japan 9%, rest of the world 6%. I expect more percentage of US dominant for US nodes. As you know, physically US is the most faraway country for Korea(no cable under pacific ocean). So 70% was quite a surprise to me. • 70% ~ 80% US communication. What is a big deal? It is just a testnet. This result is not because more than 70% of validators are american. Actually I feel they are less than 30%. Then what does it mean? Many of the validators choose US, outside from their own country, on purpose, to gain better connectivity. This effect is one way. If you taste US region connectivity, you have very little incentives to move out from US. More nodes in US, more powerful connectivity in US >> more nodes in US and then infinite loop. This is like a entropy, in a reverse way. Very unnatural and it is centralization.One of the clear evidence I am seeing is that in Korean community, quite a lot of validators want to put their majority…
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It’s hard to now how atoms holders will think, but hopefully they view geographic & legal decentralization to be important. I think advertising yourself as a validator that is physically in Korea and owned & operated by an entity subject to Korean law will be an advantage. Figment is physically in Canada, and we are owned and operated under Canadian legal jurisdiction. We think this is a selling feature.
Physical location is one thing, but if you’re hosted on AWS in Korea, you are still dependant on an American company. Hosting in such a way that your infrastructure isn’t subject to American law would set you apart.
This is tangential to your point about geography, but one of the reasons that I think validators should own and operate hardware is that co-lo facilities are much less centralized than cloud infrastructure. There are lots of high quality independent data centres that can host your gear.
yes i plans to put my validator in IDC in Seoul. But recently I felt aws instance has bad performance for its price. I might be thinking to pull out some of my public sentries in IDCs too. It will do better performance and less cost in the long term.
So I would expect Relay nodes to help a lot here.
I’d be interested in working with @bharvest on trying out a Relay node between him and the iqlusion validator
I also concern this very much.
I think that I have the same challenge with you
I expect relay node. and it is very very important for cosmos
i am not following what you are saying here zaki. who is iqlusion? what do you mean relay node between me and him? do you mean a connection between different validator nodes via private sentry?
do we have a clear definition of relay node?
I add this test result here because it is quite relevant subject. I update some multi-regional sentry setup test results here. • I had 2 sentries all in Korea, and yesterday, I add a new sentry in US East.(all aws) US sentry’s peering is great, never fall below 60. I feel quite much better connection to the network. Now I have 3 sentrys connected to my private sentry in Korea and then this one connected to validator in Korea. • After 1 day, I checked statistics of my missing blocks. Result was not very intuitive. Although I felt connectivity became much better, missing block thing never goes away at all. I was having about 30 missing in recent 10,000 blocks(0.3%), but after I added US East sentry, it actually slightly increased around 40 blocks(0.4%). • Conclusion : Because I already had enough(more than 50) peers in my Korean sentry, the new US East sentry does not affect much on my missing block status. I think this is because, whether sentry is in US or Korea, packet should travel through internet from US to Korea where my validator located. So the result was not quite satisfying. • Next move : I should try moving my validator to US region for testing missing…
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https://www.iqlusion.io/ = cosmos validator (operated by/with Zaki).
Oh… thank you for your exlpanation!! It clears everything to me. 
Relay nodes work like sentry node but connect in private network. The idea is to let validator nodes only connect to the relay nodes, then let relay nodes connect to public sentries. Relay nodes can then connect to each other in a private network. For example, the relay nodes in Forbole and connect to the relay nodes of b-harvest and connect to BianjieAI. Then we have an Asian regional private network of sentry nodes while not exposing the validator nodes. And then these relay nodes can connect to American based iqlusion, figment and Eueapon based dokia-captial etc. The regional networks can connect together to keep the sync in time, not only rely on the public sentry nodes to keep them in sync.
Thanks, man. we should definitely try this together!
why should we put relay node in a private network？i think it’s better to be public, then it could help anyone who wants to connect the blockchain.@kwunyeung
No. If it is public, it has two disadvantage.
One is security(because it is open to internet), two is performance(because connection between relay node can be done via private network provided by big cloud platform -> better latency and stability).
This kind of private connection should be done in many small groups. Because if a group has too much
connection peers, it can lose both security and performance.
So many small group of relay node connection is the answer!
And in addition in my philosophy, we need some HUMAN TRUST to build such small relay connection group.
Because for each other, we have loosened security attack point. If one of the team’s member decide to
attack another teammate, it will be much easier than attack from outside. So we need trust in small group.
So I think best topology is like a “FaceBook” network.
I want to provide another statistical test result here. • Originally I had 2 Korean sentry , 1 Korean private sentry and then validator. Missing block percentage was averaging around 0.3% • Adding US East sentry -> totally 3 sentrys running Missing block percentage was averaging around 0.3% , similar to test 0 • Now I removed 1 Korean sentry --> 1 Korean sentry and 1 US East sentry left. Missing number is similar to 30 / 10000, so no effect by removing 1. Still, it should make some vulnerablity when network is very bad, but in normal condition, not a big problem. • And then I removed the last Korean sentry. So my connection is like below. US East sentry -> private(relay) sentry KR -> validator KR Now I see some changes. _missing commits / total commits (missing rate) : _ 0/1(0.0%) 0/10(0.0%) 1/50(2.0%) 1/100(1.0%) 3/500(0.6%) 10/1000(1.0%) 19/2000(0.9%) 25/3000(0.8%) Missing rate increased from 0.3% to 1.0%. About 3 times It means that you need at least one local public sentry which is very near to validator location. • I will test on KR sentr -> private KR sentry -> KR validator set in final. Then we can understand better…
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I intend to have my validator node in Singapore with at least one sentry/backup in Hong Kong. Motivation is having my incorporation in HK due to fiscal and regulatory minimal requirements, and being offshore from Western countries. I am interested in joining an Asian relay network.
From Zaki in: Sentry Node Architecture Overview - #33 by gkrizek
I’ve been thinking that validators should consider adding another type of node to their Architecture- Relay Nodes.
Here is the definition of a Relay node. A Relay Node is a full node that only make connections to sentry nodes of other validators that the operator of the Relay Node. it runs with pex disabled. The firewall on the Relay node blocks all connections from ip address other than what is on a white list.
The Relay node operator will white list the ip addresses of other validators sentries on the relay node firewall and the validators will add the Relay node’s id & ip address to persistent peers.
The presence of a small number of relay nodes could help ensure that consensus operates at maximum efficiency.
in summary, we have 4 kinds of nodes so far. • public sentry node : pex-true & unfixed-peer • relay node : pex-false & fixed-peer • private sentry node : pex-false & trusted only peer • validator By my intuition, below is one of the best practice. 1 is only for searching peers - a scout. We should gather indepth quality of each peer and send those information to peer analysis server. It is not efficient to use 1 as a communicator because it will be busy spending energy for dynamic peer searching work. 2 is only for communication between the network and validator. Because list of peers in 2 is not dynamically adjusted, we should automatically manage its peer list via peer analysis server. In that way, 2 can be free from being bothered by resource spending for searching new peers, having trouble with unavailable peers, being attacked, etc. 3 is for security of validator - another wall for validator. I think this is optional. If you are confident with defensing 2, you don’t need private sentry node. 4 is signing blocks. In this architecture, one of the most important role of validator runner is to build smart peer analysis algorithm. This algorithm will decide the…
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I have been following your posts for a while certus_zl, you give good insights!
Do you work for cosmos?
nuevax:I intend to have my validator node in Singapore with at least one sentry/backup in Hong Kong. Motivation is having my incorporation in HK due to fiscal and regulatory minimal requirements, and being offshore from Western countries
I mean to have my validator hub in Singapore with somewhere around one sentry/reinforcement in Hong Kong. Inspiration is having my joining in HK because of monetary and administrative negligible necessities, and being seaward from Western nations