In theory I'm running three witness nodes, but only one of them is a "real" witness (primersion). The other two (hivegifbot, robonft) are used for creating daily backups of the engine chain. So the only reason they are witnesses, is for me to easily verify, that they are still on the same state and have not diverged, but they are offline for a few hours every day (for creating the backups). Additionally they could provide some stability in case other nodes are failing and there is an issue with the engine chain.
Is there someone with two nodes in top 20?
Balaz runs 2 that are in the top 20, maybe more.
he only manages them or also get's the rewards?
I am assuming there is a split, I know I wouldn’t do it for free, lol.
It's not about the rewards. It's about the control and stability. This is how you get a Sybil attack(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack).
I understand your concerns and I agree, but there is nothing to do about it, as long as people vote for the nodes in question. However it is still very unlikely that something like this may happen, as there are 14 signaturs required to gain control and we are still far away from that number..
I would say the bigger issue is that there are clusters of witnesses at various hosters / cloud providers, which could be an easy attack target e.g. by reporting the nodes. But the same applies to hive itself. It's not too much of an issue there though, as there are simply more witnesses.
Thanks for the update. I'll keep monitoring, but it doesn't seem good. Not at all, especially since you brought up another concern. I spent some time and saw that a lot of the ips return back to Hetzner, who's known for being cheap. It would be scary if they have a fault and cause the system to go down.
Yes, we know about the issue. Again, it's quite unlikely, as nodes are split up across different data centers. For me it's not a question of pricing, as I am running dedicated servers and no cloud servers. Simply put hetzner is just one of the best in Europe - reliable and convenient.
Once again, I do think that Hive witnesses have a similar issue, you just don't know as witness nodes are not public there.
Maybe more as in @bala41288 runs more in the top20 or that there's more users with multiple top witnesses? I couldn't see any more that I knew for a fact are connected.
That's fair, those witnesses aren't near the top and you have provided a good reason. But still makes me more nervous about the platform since from what I can tell, between 3 operators I count 6 nodes.