Editor's Note: This article comes fromCrypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley), Author: Fan Xuxin, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)

, Author: Fan Xuxin, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

On November 27th, a news about the use of GPU for “mining” on Protocol Labs’ official Slack broke out, which was interpreted by many “headline parties” as CPU mining machines “annihilated” and suffered a “disaster”.

I didn't expect this news to be over-interpreted by some unknown media, so I think it is necessary to explain the mining principle of Filecoin to set the record straight.

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The first point that needs to be emphasized is that Filecoin is different from other decentralized storage projects. In other projects, users interact directly with the platform, and users do not know which miner stores the data. Filecoin provides a platform similar to Taobao, and users can choose miners for data storage, that is, Filecoin uses directional storage. As shown in the figure below, users can independently choose the miners responsible for storage when storing files.

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The structure and operation process of Filecoin

As shown in the figure above, the Filecoin architecture includes three parts, namely the storage market, the Filecoin blockchain, and the retrieval market. The corresponding types of miners include storage miners and retrieval miners, and there may be repair miners in the future. As the name suggests, storage miners are mainly responsible for storing files and maintaining the Filecoin blockchain. Correspondingly, storage miners' income also includes storage fees, block rewards, and transaction fees. The main task of retrieval miners is to retrieve data, and their income is retrieval fees. In the early stage of the Filecoin mainnet, due to the limited storage capacity, the retrieval demand is not much, but as the amount of data increases, the retrieval revenue may be higher than the storage revenue. The income sources of various mining tools are shown in the figure below:

Filecoin's consensus mechanism

Filecoin adopts the EC (Expected Consensus) consensus, which can be simply understood as a revision of the PoS consensus. In the PoS consensus, the rights and interests represented by mortgage tokens determine the probability of miners obtaining packaging rights. In the EC consensus, this The rights and interests become effective storage, that is, the amount of effective storage determines the probability of miners obtaining packaging rights.

What is effective storage? To put it simply, effective storage is the stored data that is finally generated after running PoRep (Proof of Replication) and PoSt (Proof of Spacetime). PoRep and PoSt are the characteristics of Filecoin, and their main function is to prevent miners from cheating or launching certain malicious attacks. PoRep is also called Proof of Replication, and its main function is for a node to prove to another node that it has stored a copy of the corresponding file. PoSt is also called proof of time and space. Its main function is to prove that a certain node has stored the corresponding file within a certain period of time. PoSt is executed in a certain period. The main purpose is to prevent miners from deleting data after the proof is completed.

As shown in the figure below, through the above analysis, it can be known that in the Filecoin storage process, the core factor that determines the miner’s income is effective storage. The ratio of the miner’s own effective storage to the effective storage of the entire network determines the probability of obtaining the packaging right, and then determines its “ Mining" income. As shown in the figure below, there are many factors that determine effective storage, and CPU performance is only one of them.

In fact, in the early days of Filecoin's launch, most miners' income did not come from storage orders, but from block rewards. Therefore, most miners will choose to fill up their hard disk space with garbage data as soon as possible to obtain as much effective storage as possible. The ideal situation is to turn all their own storage space into effective storage as soon as possible. When the storage order is generated, the original junk data is gradually deleted and stored in the corresponding order data.

Summarize

The reason why there are so many misunderstandings is mainly because many people do not understand the mining process of Filecoin, and they equate this process with BTC mining for granted. BTC mining has gone through several stages of CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC, so many people think that after Filecoin adopts the GPU solution, the previous CPU solution cannot be used. What's more, they think that Filecoin will produce ASIC mining machines.