Proving Location with Physics: Geolocation Verification on DoubleZero
Location on the internet is a best-effort guess. IP geolocation databases have somewhere between 50–70% city-level accuracy under good conditions, and worse in the cloud and colocation environments where most production infrastructure lives. GPS is precise but requires hardware access to datacenter rooftops that simply isn't practical at scale. Self-attestation, or where an operator independently reports where they are, is trivially, fakeable and offers no assurance for compliance or governance.