In this year's blockchain industry, Filecoin will inevitably become one of the most high-profile new projects.

Chain Catcher learned that with the warm-up of many communities and the promotion of manufacturers, the sales of Filecoin mining machine market in the past few years may have exceeded 20 billion yuan, and its ecological scale has become closer to relatively mature mainstream blockchain projects .

However, in the interview with the chain catcher, many professionals who understand the Filecoin ecology pointed out that there are necessary reasons for Filecoin's multiple delays. Fei Erke CEO Xie Dapao summarized three main factors to the chain catcher: first, many algorithm codes of Filecoin are developed by different teams on different clients, and the interoperability of different clients still needs to be debugged; second, Filecoin The token economic model has not yet been determined, including the token mortgage model that ensures that miners will not destroy data; third, the audit of the main network code will take at least 1-2 months to complete.

"There are no insurmountable technical problems, they are normal code structure adjustments." Dapao Xie continued, "The launch of the mainnet is of great importance and cannot be sloppy. The hole you poke is even bigger, so I would rather be more rigorous in the early stage, take a longer time, and do enough details.”

There are still more than three months before the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. After brief complaints by miners and other groups, they have focused their attention on mining machine testing. After all, most people may be more concerned about the potential of Filecoin than the lofty ideals it may bring. wealth effect.

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The mining machine is hot, and the doorway is complicated

As an incentive layer project of the IPFS protocol, Filecoin issued the token FIL to reward contributors, but its reward mechanism is different from most blockchain projects, and it is not based on data distribution such as computing power, token size, and voting ratio. Rewards are determined based on the scale of storage and retrieval services provided by contributors.

At the same time, contributors can only participate in the storage work of the protocol by purchasing dedicated storage equipment, the so-called Filecoin mining machine. Because this type of mining machine has higher requirements on hard disk and other equipment, its unit price is more expensive than mining machines for Bitcoin and other projects. Almost all types of mining machines cost 10,000 yuan, and some models even cost hundreds of thousands. .

Even so, Filecoin mining machines are still enthusiastically sought after by the market. Hu Feng, the operating partner of the Filpool mining pool, told the chain catcher that it is understood that there are at least 200-300 domestic Filecoin mining machine sellers, and it is said that there are several manufacturers whose sales even exceed 1 billion. At the same time, he also estimated that the total sales of the Filecoin mining machine market in the past few years is expected to exceed 20 billion yuan, which has exceeded the sales of many mainstream Bitcoin mining machine manufacturers in the past two years.

However, there is actually a lot of water in this data. Because Filecoin has a huge aura but has not been able to launch the mainnet for a long time, a large number of scams under the guise of "IPFS mining machines" have emerged in the market in the past 18 years. The trick is to sell a large number of inferior and invalid mining machines. At the beginning of 19, Henan was exposed by many media for a fraud case under the name of Filecoin mining machine. According to China Business News, Henan Lianxin Technology Co., Ltd. sold to thousands of people in the name of Filecoin mining within 5 months. Nearly 300,000 so-called "snail interstellar servers" were stolen, and the total amount of fraud may be as high as 2 billion.

At the same time, because Filecoin officials have not released specific guidance standards for mining machine configuration for a long time, especially in 2018 when there was little project code information, many companies eager to sell or realize cash produced a large number of mining machines based on unilateral estimates of configuration and sold them. , but judging from the current test network data, its configuration is far from the actual needs, and the mining efficiency is very low.

"The early mining machines that used the ARM architecture and Intel's low-end chips are completely useless and can only be used as storage devices for their own use," Xie Dapao said.

With the launch of the Filecoin test network in December last year, major mining machine manufacturers were able to access the network to test the actual mining efficiency of the mining machines, and then adjust the configuration of their own mining machine equipment in a targeted manner. From the beginning of January, the sales staff of Filecoin mining machines began to appear in the field of vision of the blockchain industry with unprecedented strength and scope, declaring that Filecoin mining machines will be one of the biggest wealth opportunities in the blockchain industry this year. At the same time, it is also attracting more miners to join the network ecology.

However, considering the uneven quality of Filecoin mining machine manufacturers and the uncertainty of the currency price model, the dream of wealth for miners may not be so easy.

At the same time, the mining pool's clustering scheme for mining machines and the optimization of mining algorithms also have an important impact on mining efficiency. "The optimization of the cluster solution can achieve an effect of 1+1 greater than 2, which doubles the efficiency of mining machines of the same size." Hu Feng said, from the testnet data, it can be seen that the top 5 mining pools' coin production The efficiency is more than 4 times that of 6-10 mining pools.

Filecoin mining machines also have higher requirements for the mining farm operating environment than other project mining machines, "If the mining machine suddenly loses power and shuts off the network when submitting the storage certificate, the stored data will be destroyed and it will take a lot of time to restart. "Xie Dapao told the chain catcher.

In the sales of mining machines, in order to increase customers' willingness to purchase, many mining machine manufacturers will talk about the coin production efficiency and payback cycle of mining machines. More than 7,000 coins can be produced, and the cost can be recovered in about three months. However, in fact, the efficiency of mining machine coin production is determined by multiple factors and is not a fixed value.

"Only by setting the specific number of working machines in the entire network and assuming that the technical level of each mining machine manufacturer is exactly the same, can it be possible to calculate the amount of coins produced by the mining machines. Calculating the amount of coins produced and the payback period without preconditions are hooligans. "Zhou Xuesong told the chain catcher.

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A key part of the economic model has yet to be verified

At the currency price level, Filecoin also has great uncertainty. At present, many third- and fourth-tier exchanges have launched futures trading of Filecoin token FIL, and the price difference between different platforms is large and the liquidity is low. The current price is mostly in the range of 27-44 yuan, and the highest in the past year has exceeded 70 yuan. Compared with the public offering of FIL, the price has risen several times.

He Chenfeng, CEO of Wenchu ​​Blockchain, pointed out in an analysis on the Internet that according to statistics on the amount of currency produced by Filecoin investors, protocol laboratories, foundations and miners, the total currency output per month in the first six months was 34.11 million pieces, the total output in the first year was 365.13 million pieces. If FIL enters the top ten cryptocurrency market capitalization rankings in the first month, the price will break through 879 yuan; if it takes half a year to reach the top ten, the price will reach 146 yuan, and the top five will be 732 yuan.

From the perspective of the team, investors and technology of the Filecoin project, such optimistic forecasts certainly have a certain logical basis, but this cannot avoid the problems of its economic model.

As a distributed storage project, Filecoin's token FIL's fundamental application scenario is the use of commercial storage customers and the mining mortgage of miners, but the former is quite unrealistic in the past one or two years.

"Under the condition that the Filecoin storage network is not yet fully developed, large-scale enterprise commercial data storage will consume a lot of time and hardware resources, which means that its large-scale commercial use in the early stage of the mainnet launch is not yet realistic. We can only look forward to the official announcement. After going online, continue to optimize and adjust, and after the network is stable for 2-3 years, and the global consensus is very high, these large-scale companies may consider using this network.” Zhou Xuesong said.

This also means that in recent years, the price of FIL will be mainly supported by miners who buy coins as collateral and investors in the secondary market. The growth of miners and storage space and the investment hype in the secondary market will largely determine The currency price trend of FIL.