I’m curious as to why this particular region of Europe has a much denser cluster of relays than the rest of the continent. Is this area popular for cloud providers to locate their data centers?
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All in Germany, Switzerland and Netherlands
Yeah it’s odd, because large countries like the UK, Spain, Italy and France only have a handful of relays while those 3 you mentioned have dozens.
cloud providers + high population density + strong Bitcoin community. German speaking area runs a lot of Bitcoin and Lightning nodes aswell.
Interesting, didn’t know that!
oh, forgot the netherlands. lots of maxis there, too. https://amboss.space/community/14720cb7-269a-43ce-bfff-b8aa3ba9ad16
Very strong Bitcoin community right there. German Bitcoin node runners are second behind the US. Frankfurt and Amsterdam are the big data center locations as well.
Check BTCmap's new Filter option "communities". It shows all kinds of Bitcoin meetups. Central Europe's meetup community is growing steadily.
Another reason is something like Cloudflare where it resolves to a centralised Cloudflare DC and location is then not necessarily accurate for the server itself.
Most US datacenters are in this region. Also most people have high English proficiency in this area.
That was also the front line of the protestant refomation. Not sure if the cultural remnants of defying rulers is still kicking on or something else.
Interesting historical take...
I don't think so. The popular area is up in Scandinavia