RE: BLOCKCHAIN: Considerations on decentralization and witnesses
Not sure what using a cloud has to do with IP (because lack of knowledge), I would guess the clouds have some sort of special IP?
If you use Amazon unless you are routing IP blocks owned by you (not what people normally do) you will be using elastic IP or static IP supplied by Amazon. What this means is Amazon owns a chunk of IP addresses. When you set up a server and it is running live one of those IP addresses will be assigned to you.
So if there are 10 witnesses running on Amazon out of the top 19 (not actual, just as a hypothetical example) we could potentially determine that by looking at their IP addresses and seeing which company those IP addresses are registered to. If they are all Amazon and in a big contiguous block then you know those 10 witnesses all could potentially go down if something happened with Amazon be it accidental, or intentional through government/corporate pressure. So 10 of your "distributed" witnesses would technically only truly be distributed as long as Amazon remains Hands-off.
As far as accidental down-time. Amazon offers services that are supposed to work if one data area goes down, but you have to pay extra for those. You'll usually pick something like East Coast, or West Coast, but if you want both for redundancy that costs extra and a lot of people don't do that.
I haven't looked much into Microsoft's Azure, but it is likely similar.
There are other extremely technical ways sites can be attacked that have little to do with Amazon, Azure, etc. Those cannot be completely avoided, but by being highly distributed it is a lot more difficult and can near impossibility to accomplish. I never say "impossible" as an absolute as that is like honey to flies in tempting someone to prove that it was possible. :)
diversity for stability is of course a good concept to protect the blockchain and thinking you have complete security is like building an unsinkable ship. If there was only a famous example that I could use as analogy...
I am still not quite sure, are you talking about the service provider people use for their internet in general or is Amazon offering a special server-based service? In Germany we have different internet providers mainly Telecom so I always get confused when talking about the US systems.
Btw do you know Peter Thiel? He is actually someone who made me think that maybe not all economics is evil before Ron Paul did. I wrote a small post about him, he has some really unique approaches.
https://steemit.com/celebreties/@thatgermandude/introducing-peter-thiel-one-of-the-greatest-minds-of-our-time-and-an-honest-provocateur
In the U.S. and likely other places Amazon has a cloud service that is pretty good and easy to use and can auto scale to usage. A large amount of servers and websites have been switching to it. It is known as AWS.
ah OK, I get it. Thanks for the explanation.
I've never met him, but I definitely do know who he is. :)