In 2020, when industry hotspots are lacking, Filecoin, the incentive layer of the IPFS network protocol, which has been born for nearly three years but has been slow in technological progress, has received continuous attention. According to incomplete statistics, related mining machines worth 50 billion yuan have been sold in the Chinese market in the past three years. There are 500 teams or companies selling mining machines. Today, the second phase of the Filecoin testnet public test was also launched on May 15th in anticipation of the miners.

However, popular projects are always inseparable from speculation and hype. We have seen that in this round of Filecoin public beta, there are not only unprincipled speculators, but also leading mining machine manufacturers in the industry are taking the opportunity to create marketing gimmicks, which once made Filecoin The public beta has become a place where various mining machine manufacturers "compete for beauty".

Author/Wang Dashu

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Leather bag companies take up positions and hype hot spots

"It is useless to look at the brand and model. It mainly depends on the configuration, server and data center, and whether there is a license issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. For example, our company holds the national IDC/ CDN has dual licenses, and our machines are all Dell-customized servers. The technology is derived from the IPFS of Stanford University’s protocol laboratory. At present, this technology is attracting a lot of attention around the world.” This is a salesperson named Xiaoxi Chain catcher introduces how to choose a series of words for Filecoin mining machines.

However, when asked whether the mining machine participated in the second phase of the public beta, the other party said firmly: "We can only participate in the test after the main network vulnerability is fixed."

Afterwards, Xiaoxi began to introduce the advantages of his own mining machines. For example, the company has strategic cooperation with the world's top server manufacturers. The central city; the technical team is composed of people with professional backgrounds in the world's top 500 such as Cisco, Oracle, Huawei, Dell, and Pioneer; various cooperation plans, and taxation and legal affairs are optimized by professional institutions to ensure rigor, standardization, and perfection; servers participate in IPFS network testing ;Strategic planning is advancing rapidly, and has started cooperation and services in catering, automobile, insurance and other industries.

However, this statement is nonsense to Tian Shu, an old miner who has been paying attention to Filecoin mining machines for a long time. "Testing is to find bugs. Why their mining machines can't run? Either the technology is not good, or it's a leather bag company that doesn't produce machines and wants to gossip."

In addition, DALL's customized servers are generally only available to international giants such as Huawei, Google, and Amazon, and unknown small companies cannot get customized services at all, so it is likely that the manufacturer is doing a marketing gimmick to deceive consumers.

As for the above-mentioned strategic plans such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology license, IDC computer room, professional legal team, and catering vehicles, they have nothing to do with the performance of the mining machine. I don't understand what the IPFS network protocol and the Filecoin incentive layer are, and it may just be a pyramid scheme company.

However, in this public test of Filecoin, there are not a few such companies, but the degree of false information is different.

According to Fu Yun, a person familiar with the matter, many intermediary full-time sales companies without machines or technology will choose to rent IDC computer rooms or even supercomputing centers for testing. The mining machine participated in the public test to obtain the ranked miner number, so that in the future, it can be publicized that its own machine has high performance, so as to achieve the purpose of acquiring customers.

Powerful teams compete for rankings, burn money to PK

In fact, it is just hype for leather bag companies, but for technical miners who really participate in the test, not only can they get rewards of more than 1 million tokens officially prepared by Protocol Labs (although the reward details have not yet come out), You can also get extra subsidies from the government for big miners. The most important thing is that the test results are still the best advertisement for mining machine manufacturers.

Although the original intention is good, it ignores human nature. This open beta not only attracted the above leather bag companies to participate, but also indirectly provided a stage for mining machine manufacturers to take the opportunity to show off their muscles. In addition to rewards, you can also get data on the list that makes novice investors more convincing.

Fu Yun told Chain Catcher that there are currently more than 12,000 mining machines participating in the second phase of public testing, and 233 test nodes, including 156 in China (including Hong Kong) and 67 overseas, which are very active. However, what is surprising is that it took only 5 days for the miners in the second test to complete the 5-month road for the first test. The speed is amazing, which is also the result of the competition among various manufacturers.

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Miners’ computing power trend chart, the data comes from Filscan—Filecoin block explorer

In addition, it can also be seen from the testnet list in the above figure that during the test period, the computing power of a certain node increased sharply as a whole, which to a certain extent indicates that some miners are increasing the number of machines participating in the test in order to have a reliable top ranking.

Fu Yun revealed that some manufacturers will even pile up 100-200 or even 1000-3000 machines, keep them powered on all the time, and dominate the rankings. Once they are surpassed, they will continue to burn money to increase machines to ensure their rankings.

However, although the list is cool, it needs real money to support it. Companies with insufficient funds cannot afford to play the game when the official promised rewards are not yet in sight. This also increases the participation in the test to a certain extent. cost threshold. The following is the effective storage growth and test cost of the selected nodes that went online first on May 15th. Among them, the total test cost of the miner numbered t1102 is nearly 20 million yuan.

Note: 1. Calculation method: number of machines = number of Messages - number of PreCommit Sectors (this method is only valid under certain conditions);

3. Assuming that the mainnet is launched in the second test, the test machine runs for 45 days, and the cost of single machine hosting operation and maintenance is 1,000 yuan.

Although the manufacturers participating in the test have proved their technical strength by being listed and ensuring a stable increase in computing power, investors need to recognize that this is the result of the combined effect of a large number of machines and does not represent the performance of a single machine.

According to Tian Shu, the general manufacturers will now sell mining machines with a single high-quality data such as the first in effective storage, the number of burst blocks, and the first in single-T efficiency, and will not use the comprehensive performance of the computing power of a single unit. U of T clearly informs users.

In this regard, the chain catcher specially contacted and consulted with the sales of the 1475 mining machine. The other party informed the results of the second phase of the public test of their own mining machine from the very beginning: "The number of blocks exploded by our mining machine, the ranking of the effective computing power public test They are all number one, and now everyone is scrambling for the first mine, and the early deployment will benefit early." Then the contract was sent to the chain catcher, hoping to learn more about it.

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Screenshot of the contract

However, the contract was suspicious. For example, in the column of product name and model, investors cannot determine how the corresponding configuration is combined, nor can they confirm whether the hardware is old or new; for example, in the column of free hosting and operation and maintenance, it should be noted that customers cannot take away the physical machine , you need to wait until the end of the 1-year escrow period to get it back, which is equivalent to buying computing power in disguise. Even if late-stage investors can get back the physical mining machine, it is still impossible to confirm whether the core custom chip has been replaced.

In this regard, Tian Shu believes that 1475 is still reliable in the industry. Only those companies that promise consumers to pay back the cycle, accurately predict prices, or recruit people to act as distribution agents may be real scam companies.

However, he still suggested that novice miners should learn more about this circle, “You can learn how institutional investors do due diligence on projects, which mainly includes on-site communication with technical personnel, querying technical skills, understanding the resume of the founding team, etc. Don’t be too troublesome, after all, buying a mining machine is essentially an investment.”

Although the purpose of swiping the list is for rewards and advertising needs, and it also confuses consumers to a certain extent, but manufacturers are also facing great risks.