Blockchains are decentralized; are they genuinely? We analyze blockchain decentralization's often-overlooked but quantifiable dimension: geospatial distribution of transaction processing. Blockchains bring with them the potential for geospatially distributed transaction processing. They enable validators from geospatially distant locations to partake in consensus protocols; we refer to them as minority validators. Based on our observations, in practice, most validators are often geographically concentrated in close proximity. Furthermore, we observed that minority validators tend not to meet the performance requirements, often misidentified as crash failures. Consequently, they are subject to punishment by jailing (removal from the validator set) and/or slashing (penalty in native tokens). Our emulations, under controlled conditions, demonstrate the same results, raising serious concerns about the potential for the geospatial centralization of validators. To address this, we developed a solution that easily integrates with consensus protocols, and we demonstrated its effectiveness.

翻译：区块链是去中心化的——它们真的去中心化吗？我们分析了区块链去中心化中常被忽视但可量化的维度：交易处理的地理空间分布。区块链具备实现地理空间分布式交易处理的潜力，使来自不同地理位置的验证者能够参与共识协议——我们将这类验证者称为少数验证者。基于我们的观察，在实践中，大多数验证者往往在地理上高度集中于邻近区域。此外，我们发现少数验证者通常难以满足性能要求，常被误判为崩溃故障，因而面临监禁（从验证者集合中移除）和/或罚没（扣除原生代币）的惩罚。在受控条件下进行的仿真实验得出了相同的结果，这引发了对验证者地理空间集中化潜在风险的严重担忧。为解决这一问题，我们开发了一种易于与共识协议集成的解决方案，并验证了其有效性。