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Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)

Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)

, Author: 0x66, 0x29, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Although PoC and Filecoin are not the same in concept, the biggest commonality between the two is the hard disk. PoC talks about hard disk mining, and Filecoin talks about hard disk storage. If nothing else, this top project, which raised $200 million three years ago, will launch its mainnet this year, and PoC may also benefit.

Filecoin's actions this year are extremely frequent. Although the main network is still delayed, the test network has given long-awaited investors a glimpse of the dawn. On May 11, the second phase of testing will begin. And just yesterday, Filecoin launched a brand called Filecoin Discover. Under this brand, Filecoin launched a hard drive.

The question brought about by this action is, will the appearance of this official hard drive move the cakes of other IPFS mining machine manufacturers on the market?

secondary title

The Chaos of the IPFS Mining Machine Market

Baidu search "IPFS mining machine", the home page is not only selling mining machines, but also buying mining machines to protect rights. This top-level project has attracted too many people's attention. After all, it was born with a golden spoon in its mouth, and its market value was once thought to exceed that of EOS, which is known as "Blockchain 3.0".

Filecoin, based on the IPFS protocol, has joined the economic system and is naturally a star project in the minds of investors.

Therefore, its mining machines are being sold everywhere on the Internet; it has never said that it will log on to the trading platform, but several platforms have its futures. It has not landed yet, but many people have built applications based on it.

"There are about 500 IPFS mining machine brands on the market, and good and evil are mixed." An investor who invested hundreds of thousands in Filecoin mining machines last year said, "Shenzhen has the most. In the early stage, everyone didn't understand, so they can be deceived."

There are several key factors in Filecoin mining: First, there must be users and user uploads before the mine can be mined; then, bandwidth, hard disk size, user distance, etc. must be considered in order to be able to mine successfully.

Therefore, regardless of whether the various IPFS mining machine brands on the market have used the aura of star projects to deceive consumers, more importantly, it is useless for investors to buy mining machines now, because there is no main network.

Yesterday, Filecoin officially launched the hard drive. Public opinion believes that this is to force miners to use their own official mining machines and suppress other mining machine manufacturers. "Other mining machines can no longer be used." After seeing the launch of the official hard drive, many people held similar views.

secondary title

The official release of hard drives, mining machine manufacturers are generally not worried

According to the official introduction, this project called Discover is mainly to encourage early miners to store valuable information in exchange for Filecoin tokens, "to help securely store data sets that are important to human beings."

The Filecoin Discover store shows that this hard drive is priced at $265 and has a capacity of 8TB. ​​The most important thing is that the hard drive stores data in fields such as climate science reports and disease tracking maps. Buyers will receive a one-year guaranteed Filecoin storage protocol.

Can such an 8T hard drive with some data completely disable the IPFS mining machines of other mining machine manufacturers?

Things might not be that bad.

Rhythm BlockBeats asked several mining machine R&D companies that focus on distributed storage, and the responses they got were quite different from what everyone thought.

Su Minji, co-founder of Anti-Entropy Technology, said that Discover can only be regarded as a project in the Filecoin ecosystem. The main purpose is to promote the implementation of Filecoin, because these valuable data will be directly stored in the Filecoin network. "Officials now sell hard disks, but in fact, they use offline data transmission to allow the network to have a large amount of valuable data from the very beginning."

We have already mentioned the mining logic of Filecoin. Simply put, this is a kind of "storage mining", which depends on how many useful files you have stored. When a user uploads a file, the file will be divided into several fragments, and then the miners have to grab the fragments of the file and put them into their own hard drives to obtain Filecoin.

Therefore, there must be data in the hard disk before you can make money. This is why Filecoin stores data in the hard disk.

Xia Xia (pseudonym), the person in charge of another mining machine production company, affirmed Su’s statement, “My personal understanding is that it is a weighting tool for all miners on the network, but it is not a necessary tool.” What Discover sells is that it contains “effective data.” This is actually an opportunity for miners to provide large-scale storage of important open source data, "(for the entire project) this is just the beginning."

Su Agile gave two reasons why the official launched this mining machine:

The first is cybersecurity. He said that Chinese people are very enthusiastic about mining. At present, most of the nodes of the test network are from China. The official platforms used to communicate with the community are mostly Chinese, and many people even use Chinese to communicate directly on them. . "The enthusiasm of the Chinese miners far exceeds the expectations of the project party. Once the mainnet is launched, the computing power is likely to be concentrated in China, or even to some large miners. This is not only detrimental to the overall development of the project, but also easily leads to 51% attacks appeared."

So selling hard drives is a try. But to what extent this measure can alleviate the problem of centralization, we are currently in doubt.

The other is the consideration of healthy ecological development. He said that the official underestimated the profit-seeking nature of miners in the early stage. If there is no such hard disk that charges, miners will definitely try to store a lot of garbage data, which is very likely to cause a lot of storage resources to be wasted, and it also deviates from the project. value orientation.

"The launch of the customer authentication mechanism and the offline data transmission mechanism is actually to solve the above two problems."

A number of mining machine manufacturers have given this judgment on this hard drive: there is a high probability that it will not have any impact on the mining efficiency of the mining machines they developed. At present, the variables of Filecoin mining still revolve around the design of the customer authentication mechanism, because Until now, the official has not announced the specific requirements.

So, let's sort out, what is the difference between the official hard disk launched by Filecoin and the ordinary hard disk?

Just like the Switch game console, the most common game console is a bare metal machine, the color of the body is ordinary black and red, and there are no games in the machine, so what everyone buys is a bare metal machine.

And when the game "Animal Crossing Friends" became popular, Nintendo launched the "Dongsen Limited Edition" Switch. This hot game. In other words, players can play Dongsen games after getting this game console without other operations.

This is the difference between Filecoin official hard disk and ordinary hard disk.

Some data has been stored in the official Filecoin hard disk, the purpose is to let the miners get the hard disk and install it on the mining machine. If someone needs these data, the miner can directly get the Filecoin reward without storing the data in the empty hard disk this action. Just like the Switch Dongsen limited machine has built-in games.

Can I participate in Filecoin network mining without this hard drive? Su said that this hard drive can be connected to their mining machine at that time. "The standard of the hard drive is relatively simple. The difficulty of Filecoin mining lies in the software." Just like ordinary Switch, you can play Dongsen, but there is an extra step to download.