After the completion of the third Bitcoin halving, the attention of the number one hotspot in the public chain industry has shifted to ETH2.0. On the other hand, a hot spot in the mining circle is focused on the Filecoin project. In May 2020, the Filecoin test network was launched; on June 10, Filecoin announced that it will release the reward plan for the Filecoin test network, inviting miners from all over the world to participate in running the network and get 4 million Filecoin token rewards.
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What is the relationship between IPFS and Filecoin?
Filecoin is a decentralized storage network based on the IPFS protocol, and it is also a public chain system that combines blockchain technology. FIL (filecoin) is a token based on its public chain issued by the project through ICO. Incentives to participate in the behavior of participants such as storage and retrieval markets in the Filecoin network.
IPFS, the full name of InterPlanetary File System, is called "Interplanetary File System" in Chinese. It is an open point-to-point distributed file system that can connect all computing devices with the same file system. To put it simply, anyone can use this protocol for free to create different types of applications based on the protocol. Through this underlying protocol, files stored on the IPFS system can be quickly accessed anywhere in the world.
The Internet protocol we are using now is "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)", and the HTTP protocol has the characteristics of hypercentralization. For example, when we download files from the Internet or browse the web, we can only get the information we need from one data center at a time. If the data center fails or is attacked, files will be lost or web pages cannot be opened.
The original intention of developing the IPFS protocol is to supplement the HTTP protocol and solve its centralization problem. Therefore, the IPFS protocol itself is a decentralized network infrastructure. Its principle is to use content-based addresses to replace domain name-based addresses. Simply put, users are looking for content stored in a certain place, not a certain address. , you only need to confirm the hash of the verification content, so you can get faster, secure, robust, and durable web pages.
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The operation mode of Filecoin
Speaking of this, we may still be a little vague about what the Filecoin project does. Simply put, what the Filecoin project wants to do is to utilize all idle storage resources and form an algorithmic market. For example, this model of sharing resources can be compared with that of Airbnb, which puts idle resources on the Internet to those who need them, and those who share resources can earn rent.
In Filecoin, users pay tokens based on demand and hire miners to store and distribute data. Miners contribute idle storage space and bandwidth and get token rewards. Therefore, it is a network in which miners and customers participate together and each takes what they need. , then analyze its mode of operation in detail, that is, the economic model.
As a storage network, Filecoin is committed to turning cloud storage into a storage trading market. This trading market is divided into a "retrieval market" and a "storage market". There are customers and miners in the two markets. The storage market is a verifiable market, which is verified by the blockchain network. In the storage market, customers put forward the demand for data storage, and the storage suppliers are storage miners, who provide their storage space. The retrieval market is an off-chain market, which provides the data required by customers for retrieval, and retrieval services are provided by retrieval miners. Retrieval miners do not participate in the block generation process, and directly obtain corresponding service fees from the client. The purpose of the FIL token is to connect IPFS users and Filecoin miners.
(1) Consensus and incentive mechanism
Filecoin adopts a hybrid consensus mechanism: the expected consensus (EC) is the main one, and the replication proof (PoRep) and space-time proof (PoSt) are supplemented. As an incentive, Filecoin issued FIL tokens using the blockchain token system, with a total issuance of 2 billion. According to the official token distribution plan, 70% of them will be released linearly through block rewards and distributed to miners. The rest will be allocated 15%, 10%, and 5% to the team, investors, and foundations as R&D operations, investment dividends, and community building expenses.
Filecoin miners will receive block rewards based on their storage capacity. The measure of storage capacity is how many units of effective storage space and storage time a miner provides in the Filecoin network. Therefore, it can be understood that the storage capacity of Filecoin miners is equivalent to the computing power of miners in the Bitcoin network. The block rewards obtained by miners depend on the proportion of their storage capacity to the storage capacity of the entire network. For example, if a miner provides 1 PB of storage computing power when the network size is 100 PB, then he will receive one percent of the block reward for the corresponding time.
(2) Pledge mechanism
In addition, it should be noted that the participation and mining of Filecoin is not only possible with mining machines, but also requires pledged tokens.
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When a miner wants to add a sector to the Filecoin network, he needs to pledge a locked fund. This locked fund consists of two parts: the FIL tokens held by the miners themselves and part of the block rewards. If the miner goes offline within the promised storage time, he loses a portion of the locked funds. If a miner stops storage altogether, he may lose all locked tokens.
Is IPFS mining reliable?
Finally, back to the issue of Filecoin mining, which is also the most concerned issue of many mining circle investors. Is distributed storage mining reliable?
In 2018, the IPFS protocol and Filecoin were popular in the mining circle, causing a wave of frantic mining, and various "IPFS mining machines" bloomed everywhere. Due to the repeated delays in the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, the mining algorithm has not been announced for a long time, and the mining machines and tokens have always only been futures, and cannot really mine. The threshold for imitating and impersonating its projects is extremely low, and market investors are also It is difficult to distinguish between true and false, so there were many IPFS mining scams at that time, and many investors suffered from it.
Today, the progress of the Filecoin project is finally on the right track, and the test network has been launched. According to the latest filecoin roadmap, the Filecoin main network is expected to be launched between July 20 and August 10.
Behind the attention of the project, we focus on a question, is it worth participating in Filecoin mining? After the Filecoin mainnet goes online, can ordinary people participate in Filecoin mining with their own storage devices at home?
Xie Jinbin (known as "Xie Dapao"), CEO of Feierke (the founder of the Filecoin.cn Chinese community), expressed his views on this issue in a recent interview with Lieyun Finance. He said that Filecoin mining is completely different from traditional Bitcoin mining. There are two tracks. Doing Filecoin with traditional Bitcoin mining thinking can easily lead to heavy losses.
"Filecoin mining is very different from Bitcoin mining. The first thing that bears the brunt is mortgage coins, while traditional Bitcoin mining does not require mortgages, and the machine can be dug as soon as the machine is turned on. The premise of Filecoin mining is that you have mortgage coins in your hand. storage space. It has three kinds of benefits, one is the pledge space, the second is to store some random numbers, invalid data can also get part of the benefits, and the other is to store credible and verifiable data provided by the official. You will earn more."
On May 28, Jiang Zhuoer also posted on Weibo to comment on the recent hot Filecoin. He believes that the current performance of Filecoin is not enough to store small movies, and the economic model is wrong. Currently, miners rely on some GPUs for calculations, not storage. To get rewards, so there is no plan to participate in Filecoin mining.
From this point of view, for retail investors, Filecoin mining is different from traditional PoW mining and is a relatively complicated process. Before participating in Filecoin mining, you need to think carefully, learn the way, and don't follow the trend.
Now is the time when the project is hot, all kinds of marketing chaos, investors should keep their eyes open. For example, during the public beta phase of the Filecoin test network some time ago, major miners set off a wave of rankings, resorting to various marketing gimmicks and piling up beautiful test data to compete for rankings.
So, for ordinary people who are already planning and ready to participate in Filecoin mining, what should we pay attention to when choosing mining machines? Li Haotian, CEO of Diancun Technology, believes that the most important thing is to choose a reliable manufacturer and company, look at and compare more, and it depends on the input-output ratio of the hardware. The data on the test network does not represent the real delivery plan. Before placing an order, it is necessary to conduct actual measurements to test the real performance of these machines. In addition, it is critical to choose companies that use first-hand hardware and can deliver the hardware to you.
As for whether the next main network of Filecoin can be launched smoothly on time, it is still unknown. After all, the progress of the project and the launch time of the testnet have been postponed many times before, which caused dissatisfaction among investors. Considering the reasons of the epidemic, many investors are still worried that the project will be postponed again.
Finally, the perspective shifts to the IPFS protocol, also known as distributed storage, which is indeed an "invention" worthy of attention. In an interview with the OKEx Intelligence Bureau, Cao Yin said that IPFS is a very important infrastructure for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, and it may replace the current ToC public cloud like Baidu Netdisk, but it is not suitable for ToB, such as financial Institutions, large Internet companies. However, it is enough (used) for ordinary users, and this alone will make the next generation of blockchain-based Internet applications (Web3.0) have a very important storage basis.
At present, as far as the monetary economics of IPFS is concerned, there are still many problems, but everyone still has great hopes. And even if IPFS fails, there will still be many similar projects that will develop, so I personally think this direction deserves attention. However, if you are really optimistic about a certain track, it is suggested that you can choose a few more tokens to form a package of assets instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.
