Thanks for the insight! So I think the "local" here is more about spreading it out across more data center providers than doing it at home.
I've been looking into running validators a bit and haven't quite wrapped my head around all the trade offs. The problem with ethereum is that it requires a huge amount of money to stake, which I can't really justify. It seems possible to run a to run a Cardano stake pool at home, but I'm not sure the incentives work, because stakers seem much more incentivized to choose professionally run pools. It seems somewhat reasonable to run a Polkadot validator, but only really in a data center, either in the cloud or with dedicated hardware. So in short I haven't really figured out a good way to get involved in validating as an amateur. And maybe that's ok, but the comment about "local" validating made me curious.
> So I think the "local" here is more about spreading it out across more data center providers than doing it at home.
As well as geographically, more nodes spread throughout more existing national governmental distributions is better than less.
> huge amount of money to stake
> So in short I haven't really figured out a good way to get involved in validating as an amateur. And maybe that's ok, but the comment about "local" validating made me curious.
Yeah, same with avalanche as it will require 2000 avax (maybe it will be lowered in the future when the dao goes online and existing stakers ok that). But at least at this point, I know people who are validating for x/p/c-chain on an RPI with 8GB of ram and external HDD or SSDs, which is way more accessible than pretty much everyone else (and has about ~973 validating nodes now).
I've been looking into running validators a bit and haven't quite wrapped my head around all the trade offs. The problem with ethereum is that it requires a huge amount of money to stake, which I can't really justify. It seems possible to run a to run a Cardano stake pool at home, but I'm not sure the incentives work, because stakers seem much more incentivized to choose professionally run pools. It seems somewhat reasonable to run a Polkadot validator, but only really in a data center, either in the cloud or with dedicated hardware. So in short I haven't really figured out a good way to get involved in validating as an amateur. And maybe that's ok, but the comment about "local" validating made me curious.