Editor's Note: This article comes fromHot Wheels Community (ID: FHBT18), Author: Pepe, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Hot Wheels Community (ID: FHBT18)

, Author: Pepe, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.

Hello everyone, I’m Pepe. It seems that among the financing projects in the currency circle in the past two years, it is rare to see large-cap projects with a market value of hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2017, after some digging holes, they didn’t know that they were working hard. It is still a project with a large market value that the young model of the club went to. This year, we should give an explanation to the leeks, otherwise the team should really run away.

Not long ago, we talked about Polkadot, which will be launched this year. Today, let’s talk about another current circle that has received relatively high attention regardless of the currency circle, chain circle, coil circle, and mining circle——Filecoin.

Many friends think that it will be a hot spot in the second half of the year, and the current progress has reached the test network. Recently, the official has specially provided 4 million token rewards on the test network. The main network is also expected to be launched from July 20 to 8 this year. Launched between the 21st of the month.

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Filecoin and IPFS protocol

I’m afraid that some new friends don’t know much about it, so here’s a little bit about the background of this project. When it comes to Filecoin, I have to mention IPFS (Interplanetary File System).

The main problem with HTTP is that it is easy to lose data. One is that its logic is addressing through the domain name, that is, when you open any website, you can find the data on the server corresponding to the domain name through the http protocol. , the other party’s server is powered off or moved, etc., the following situations may occur:

The other is user data. For example, if I upload a piece of content or a picture, it is stored on the server of a third-party application, so they can be deleted without the user's consent.

And IPFS, through the distributed structure design, can ensure that the content stored using this protocol is not so easy to lose. There used to be a slogan in China called "The Internet that Never Disappears". Its logic is similar to that of Bitcoin and BT downloads. The centralized network has the same effect. The same content is stored in multiple places, so that it will not be lost due to the shutdown of a certain centralized server.

Of course, the IPFS protocol itself has nothing to do with the blockchain. What can be related is the Filecoin project. Filecoin is also a blockchain project founded by the founder of the IPFS protocol. To build an incentive for such a protocol network through token incentives layer.

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Why is Filecoin so popular?

Because the launch of Filecoin has been put on the agenda, many friends are saying that it will be a major attraction in the currency circle in the second half of the year, but the price of its token exchange has quadrupled from the lowest point of 312:

Of course, the main network has not yet launched, and the real tokens cannot be moved. At present, all the transactions are some futures IOUs opened by the exchange. This is basically speculation. The amount behind it is a matter of changing the number in the background , or choose carefully.

Then again, why is Filecoin so popular? Even if it bounced tickets many times in three years, it did not dampen the enthusiasm in the circle.

1. Large-scale financing of 250 million US dollars, and favored by many top venture capital

Filecoin completed public and private placements in July and August 2017. The private placement was 52 million and the public placement was 205 million. At that time, it was raised in the United States from qualified investors (annual income of more than US dollars). There may be some third-party investors in China. channels, but we don’t know how many cases of “waiting for the mainnet to go live, but proxy investors run away”.

This is a token distribution model of his family before. Please refer to it. It is not clear whether there will be any changes in the final mainnet launch.

Judging from the published information, among the institutions involved in the investment, there are also top-level VCs inside and outside the circle, such as Sequoia Capital (needless to say), YCombinator (a well-known company in Silicon Valley that focuses on incubating entrepreneurial projects) , A16Z (this should be familiar, and has invested in a lot of projects in the currency circle, we only introduced it last month, and this year they brought another 500 million US dollars into the project to invest in the project).

There is also a Winklevoss Brothers Fund, which is a pair of twins. If you know a little bit about the overseas currency circle, you should have the impression that they once studded $120 in Bitcoin, and their wealth growth in the encrypted world has also increased over the years. Let them set up exchanges and investment institutions to feed back various ecology.

In an environment where resources are recognized in the currency circle, it is indeed difficult to ignore this background, including that his home has not yet been launched, and it has already been listed in the coinbase hosting project:

2. Interests brought by mining machine ecology

Which target in the currency circle can become a hot topic, in fact, what the project itself is, is not so important, except for the occasional soaring performance, it mostly depends on the interests behind it, the more interests are related, the more interest there will be The more people spread it and pay attention to it, the more beneficial it will be to its network value or market value.

Filecoin is very simple. Its biggest feature is mining, and everyone can participate. Many mining machine or graphics card manufacturers have come up with ideas. Although fil has not landed for three years, many sellers of mining machines have arrived. It is wave after wave that has made a lot of money for three years.

And in the past few years, every article you can see on WeChat about the progress of fil and Ipfs may hide a chain of selling mining machines behind it.

The total amount of Fil tokens is 2 billion. If the valuation is based on the current price, it is not low. However, most of them are mining output, and the unlocking ratio of public and private placements is relatively small (it is not clear when early investors started unlocking. ).

According to the latest media estimates, at the beginning of the mainnet launch, the daily mining volume is around 400,000, plus other releases are about 700,000-800,000, but the release of investors may not be sold immediately.

Therefore, the amount in the early stage is very limited. In addition, the miners in his family seem to have a mortgage mechanism to mortgage a part of the currency as a deposit to prevent evil. In this case, there is scarcity in the early stage, and the price is easy to speculate.

This is also a real reason why its launch has attracted so much attention. Those who subvert the Internet's orders when they come up can only hehe.

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A few issues to be aware of about filecoin

After talking about why it is so popular, the following is my personal opinion according to the tradition, for reference only, not investment advice:

1. It is too far to subvert the Internet, and it is more practical for decentralized storage. .

Some people believed this in 2018, but now we are not the youthful teenagers we used to be. Many things are not perfect, but people are used to it, and it is difficult to change. This is not to say New things can be replaced as long as one or two problems are solved. There used to be a saying that your new product must be ten times or even a hundred times better than the old product in order to convert the public.

Here I don't see that this kind of decentralized storage has enough extreme advantages, just a 404 problem, think about how much trouble you will have when you use it normally? I even found that many times when an article is posted on the Internet, it has already been copied into many copies.

I think it may be more realistic to focus on the blockchain market for decentralized storage than this kind of lofty dream. For dapp applications, there will indeed be some demand for decentralized storage.

The above picture is the map of their ecology given by the founders, and it should be developing in this direction, but there is a problem here. It is an IPFS ecology. Do these related projects only use the IPFS protocol, or can they use Filecoin products? , this is still a difference, you need to pay attention.

Some bought a mining machine, but couldn’t find anyone in the end; some bought a machine worth 1,000 or 2,000 yuan and sold it to you for 5,000 yuan, but you may not be able to mine coins in the end, because the official algorithm is also changing; It was they who got you the ecological currency (capital disk), and in the end they couldn’t get back the capital, and they might have been cheated of the investment money.

epilogue

For retail investors, this project still has a certain threshold. Before it goes online, I think it is better to be cautious. You want to get the first wave of dividends, and others think about your principal.

3. One of my feelings about filecoin is that there are many people who talk about it in China, but not many people overseas. Even if you go to Youtube to search for videos, they are basically in Chinese, which is a bit embarrassing. Who will these coins be sold to in the end? According to a certain bigwig in the currency circle, his network performance can’t even save small movies, so will someone really use their network to save files this year?