I’ve seen it brought up a couple times, but why is not only important to have validators spread across the globe, but also important to stake on validators spread across the globe?
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That is a very good question!
It’s important to spread your stake geographically as well for various reasons:
- There could be a network outage affecting that specific region.
- For example, just today some nodes missed some proposals. All of them were located in Asia. NetBlocks reported disruption to Asia and Africa: https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/1534199465199996930
- Censorship: what if all nodes were hosted in a region which one day becomes a dictatorship and starts blocking/censoring their Internet? This is even more important if/when Radix becomes the de-facto currency for DeFi.
Basically it brings a single point of failure, which isn’t good. There are many other reasons (and apocalyptic scenarios ), others might share more.
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Wow thanks for the the thorough response!
So basically it’s good to spread the validators across the globe to hedge ourselves against both potential Geopolitical and climate hazards. This makes a lot of sense. It also give me an idea to make start working on a nice map of where all the validators are located.
Thanks again!
Shane
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The folks at Radix Exchange have one that was made using Leaflet.
But would love to see what you have in mind. The key for me is ensuring the data is up to date. One of the most innovative approaches I have seen is to use IP Geolocation IP Location Finder - IP Lookup With Detailed Geolocation Data | KeyCDN Tools.
If you run a Node all the IP Addresses of known validators can be found using the Address Book API “system/addressbook” ( System API (getpostman.com))
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The guys from Stakesafe also put together a great dashboard showing the location of all validators:
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Shane are you looking for a quick view global mapping of the validator IPs? Think there was at one time an individual who was doing this initially when Olympia network was launched.
Loid
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Oh wow that Radix Exchange Map is far better than what I had planned to make using crayons and a napkin. Whew.
I’m noticing a large gap in Western Canada (where I reside), perhaps it’s time I start researching what it takes to run a validator 
Thanks for the replies y’all!
Shane
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How is that possible though? I understand issues within a country. But how can an entire continent be facing an issue, apart from apocalyptic scenario of course.
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Network issues can affect multiple countries if not continents easily. If, for example, an submarine fiber cable gets disrupted, traffic will have to flow on other links and that can create widespread issues that will cascade on other links as well. Kind of like domino effect.
That probably won’t mean zero connectivity, but it might impact latency enough to make some validators lose some proposals.
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