Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Recently, Filecoin has two things that have attracted much attention. One is the official sale of hard drives, and the other is the "vulnerability of unlimited token issuance" exposed on the test network.
Whether it is good or bad, it is sending a strong signal to people: Compared with the "turtle speed" progress of the previous two years, Filecoin has now entered a period of rapid improvement in the ecological chain: from testing codes, to launching multi-version clients, and then In terms of the market, Coinbase and other wallets support its token FIL, and multiple currency circle projects and funds have announced their entry into Filecoin mining.
In short, Filecoin has become popular. In addition to its own "competence", many people also say that it is because of the lack of hot spots this year (the essence is the lack of money-making effects).
In the primary market, people haven’t seen high-quality new projects raising funds for too long, and occasionally some projects are listed/IEO, which is no longer the myth of ten times as in the past. In the secondary market, Bitcoin's "halving effect" has been repeatedly hyped, and many people have used full leverage to "welcome the bull market", but they were wiped out by the big plunge first. As for the mining circle, many miners are already on the verge of losing money under the pressure of multiple rounds of plummeting market prices, halving block rewards, and rising Fengshui computing power.
People are constantly looking for new wealth-making machines. The heavy warehouse Ethereum 2.0 is one, and the excavation of Filecoin, the former "top currency circle" is another.
Compared with the "pioneers" who flocked to buy Filecoin mining machines in 2018, investors who entered the market this year came late, but they were smarter.
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In 2020, the capital circle competes for Filecoin
Filecoin mining is undoubtedly a recent hotspot in the capital circle.
In April 2020, the Filecoin mining solution provider "1475" announced that it has received capital injections from HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, and Emer Capital, with a post-investment valuation of RMB 400 million.
By the end of May, Odaily learned that Keystore, an enterprise-level encrypted asset service provider that had previously received an investment of tens of millions of dollars from Jianyuan Fund and Fenbushi Capital, had also entered the market in a low-key manner, positioning itself as a Filecoin mining solution provider.
According to Bryce (pseudonym), a partner of a currency circle fund, the fund intends to invest tens of millions of funds to test the waters of Filecoin mining, and is currently investigating leading miners.
Shao Jianliang, General Manager of Canaan Blockchain, publicly stated at an event at the end of May that PoW has entered a relatively high threshold stage, and distributed storage has opened up a new battlefield beyond (hash) computing power. Canaan is paying attention to IPFS and Filecoin mining development.
On May 29, Yang Xiao, co-founder of Panda Mining Machine, a graphics card mining machine manufacturer, said that the company will focus on the Filecoin mining track this year...
Since 2017, Filecoin, a shining new star, has attracted countless scammers because the project tokens and mining machines have been in the "air stage" for a long time, making the traditional currency and mining circles stop mining on Filecoin.
Today, Filecoin has not yet landed, but people's awareness of and willingness to participate in Filecoin mining has quietly changed.
In 2014, Juan Benet (Juan Bennett), who graduated from Stanford University, led a group of top students to create a protocol designed to replace HTTP-IPFS (Interplanetary File System).
In 2014, Juan Benet (Juan Bennett), who graduated from Stanford University, led a group of top students to create a protocol designed to replace HTTP-IPFS (Interplanetary File System).
HTTP is the most widely used network transmission protocol on the Internet. IPFS can be understood as a distributed version of HTTP. Its workflow is "fragmentation and encryption of files - uploading to distributed nodes to complete data storage - and then from distributed nodes Retrieving, synthesizing, and decrypting to the demand node-complete data reading".
Similar to the blockchain, "distributed, anti-censorship, and more open" is the biggest selling point of IPFS.
In order to promote the application of this open source protocol, in June 2017, the Juan team (also known as Protocol Labs, Protocol Labs) released a new distributed storage protocol Filecoin, hoping to improve the realization of distributed storage by adding an economic incentive system /use.
This project, which is big enough to imagine, has both time (ICO mania) and people, has raised 57 million US dollars from 9 well-known investment institutions since its launch, including Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, Anderson Hollow Witts Fund, Winklevoss Capital, etc.
In the subsequent public offering, although Filecoin only raised funds on Coinlist, a compliant financing platform, for qualified investors (with an annual income of more than 200,000 US dollars), which shut out countless retail investors, it still raised 2.05 million dollars within a month. 100 million U.S. dollars, becoming the largest ICO in history at that time.
The team, the hard core of the capital, the popularity of fundraising, and the strong capital make Filecoin popular before it goes online.
Those who failed to participate in ICO thought of panning for gold through FIL futures and mining machines.
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Data from: CoinMarketCap
In the hardware market, the physical mining machines of the "air project" Filecoin have also been launched one after another.
The total number of Filecoins is 2 billion, of which 70% are allocated to miners, 15% to the development team, 10% to investors, and the remaining 5% to the Filecoin Foundation. A total of 20% of the tokens of the team and the fund will be unlocked linearly in 6 years, and 10% of the investors will have an unlocking period ranging from 6 months to 3 years. Therefore, the early circulating tokens will be mainly obtained through mining.
Filecoin's mining algorithm is a unique PoC mechanism, that is, it competes for bookkeeping rights and storage fees by investing in storage capacity. The PoC consists of two parts:
Proof of Replication (PoRep) to verify that the miner has stored the file as required;
Proof of Time and Space (PoSt), that is, proof of replication is continuously generated to prove that the miner has always stored the file.
Miners who complete these two steps will be able to compete for the right to produce blocks.
For Filecoin mining machines, the test is its ability to store and transfer data, such as the total amount of storage, retrieval speed, transmission bandwidth, delay, etc. Filecoin mining machine components usually include CPU, GPU, motherboard and hard disk, similar to a high-end computer plus a hard disk, unlike Bitcoin ASIC mining machines that require custom chips. However, the cost and efficiency of different hardware are different, so how to configure highly available mining machines is still a matter of knowledge.
Mining machine manufacturers are born from this.
The computer assemblers in Huaqiangbei were the first to smell business opportunities.
In other places, lines are like mountains, and porcelain work cannot be done without diamonds, but for Huaqiangbei people who have stepped on every wave of hardware accurately, from the early copycat machines of the mobile Internet to the mining machines of the bull market in the currency circle in 2017, without them Hardware that doesn't "flip".
The Filecoin project is popular, and there is a demand for Filecoin mining machines in the market. After experiencing the huge profits of the Daoteng mining machine, businessmen in Huaqiangbei hope that Filecoin can achieve greater glory.
What's even better is that when they distribute Bitcoin mining machines, they can only earn money from one middleman. In the matter of producing and selling Filecoin mining machines, they can earn money from two links.
So the upstream supply chain and some manufacturers were born. They don't even care whether they produce mining machines or scrap iron, and they don't care whether they can mine coins.
Since 2018, hundreds of Filecoin mining machines have emerged one after another, and now there are more than a dozen that can be named, and more are secretly sold in "private domain traffic".
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Screenshot from: Chaoge Blockchain Study Notes
There is no doubt that most of these are fake Filecoin miners.
The chief architect of 6block's pomegranate mining pool "Li Bai" made judgments from two aspects.
Logically speaking, Filecoin officially started submitting code on Github in June 2018, and did not finalize the mining plan until June this year. "So how can the mining machine that was randomly configured 2 years ago work normally?"
Furthermore, judging from the hardware configuration required by the current main network, an ordinary Filecoin mining machine needs to be equipped with at least AMD CPU, 1TB SSD (solid state drive), and 128GB memory. The cost of these accessories alone is not less than 6,000 yuan . On the other hand, the price of the above-mentioned mining machines is between 2000-6000 yuan, how to achieve the basic configuration?
In this regard, the employees of Starland who are still in operation said that none of this machine can mine alone, and can only participate in clusters and as a storage node. In addition, "the product didn't sell much, and it was taken off the shelves very early."
At that time, there were some mining machines on the market with a price of 5,000-10,000 yuan, but a person in charge of a Filecoin mining machine manufacturer pointed out that their availability was also questionable.
The person in charge said that most of these mining machines are home network storage devices (ie NAS machines), using ARM architecture, low configuration, not enough to support the operation of the algorithm; stability is not guaranteed when building a cluster, and they are not suitable for mining Filecoin.
If you buy these mining machines, maybe you can’t help but think that if the performance is worse, it will be worse, and the big deal is to mine less.
However, according to "Li Bai in the currency circle", low allocation of mining opportunities will lead to low mining efficiency and slow calculations, and the official has set a minimum threshold for mining speed. The three stages of mining must be calculated in one day, otherwise it will not be recognized by the system. Become an effective computing power and compete to produce blocks.
But these fake outrageous mining machines were once all the rage and attracted countless gold.
Take the only "snail mining machine" that was investigated by the police as an example. According to China Business News, from October 2018 to February 2019, the company sold thousands of people in the name of Filecoin mining machines. Nearly 300,000 "Snail Interstellar Servers" were defrauded of 2 billion yuan in just 5 months.
The "snail mining machine" is just the tip of the iceberg. With the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, more fake mining machines will show their original shape.
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How did I sell millions of "fake mining machines"?
The problem lies precisely in the "newness" of Filecoin. Circle traders take advantage of people's poor information/cognition in the professional field, advocating that star projects will bring rich returns, and attract investors in the currency circle or who are in the circle.
A biang is the agent of one of the mining machines (also known as "city node"). He makes a living from "investment projects" all the year round. In 2017, he caught up with the bull market in the currency circle and made some money in the ICO wave, but unfortunately he did not catch up with Filecoin, a king-level project.
Therefore, when A biang discovered that he could participate in Filecoin by buying and selling mining machines and running the machines, he decided that this was an opportunity to get on board.
After researching and comparing the fundamentals of various mining machine manufacturers, Abiang decided to invest hundreds of thousands of yuan in buying 40 mining machines from a certain manufacturer, obtaining the qualification of a first-level dealer, and getting the lowest purchase price .
For Abiang, the attractiveness of this manufacturer is that there are physical companies and products for inspection, and the marketing and operation models are very mature.
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Filecoin mining machine classic copywriting
The more extreme brand pass is to spend money to invite celebrities to stand on the platform. For example, the above-mentioned snail mining machine actually invited Hurun, the founder of the "Hurun List" at a conference, saying that they would cooperate to create the CAI 100 Rich List to indirectly endorse the project.
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The picture shows Hurun participating in the Snail Mining Machine (CAI) event
One-machine dual-mining is also a classic marketing strategy, and its logic is smooth (mining a small currency before FIL goes online to maximize revenue), but the tokens created for selling mining machines can be imagined. What will be the trend. Even if the token is not issued by a mining machine manufacturer, but a PoC project token like Filecoin, there is no relatively high-quality project in terms of fundamentals and token prices.
But mining machine buyers believe in each "routine".
According to A biang’s observation, most of the customers who come through online and offline diversion are elderly people. Many of them have joined and invested in Internet projects before, or speculated on coins, or simply played in the circle project.
"Although people don't know what files and data storage are, Filecoin has a natural advantage that the project team and capital are very reliable, and its information is everywhere on the Internet. It is different from those real and fake projects. It’s much easier to launch a brand new small project.” A biang introduced.
A biang found that, like himself, they had no good projects to vote for.
"They all believe in the myth of doubling their wealth, so investment opportunities in the big market, such as stock funds and financial management, must not be appreciated. Seeing Filecoin and being able to participate in it, I feel that my good luck is coming."
When asked whether he had reminded these novices of risks such as the delay of the main network of the project and the failure to deliver mining machines, Abiang waved his hands repeatedly.
"You don't know, when selling this, you should try your best to avoid reminding the risks. The benefits should be talked about, and the high returns must be publicized."
Including Abiang himself, he was also attracted by the benefits of "urban nodes".
After becoming a "node", a mining machine with a purchase price of several thousand can be sold for about 10,000, and the profit is quite high. This is a one-time income from the hardware; the second income is the mining share. Because of the professionalism of mining itself, ordinary customers can hardly operate and maintain the mining machine by themselves. Therefore, manufacturers often provide one-stop services from production to mining.
After 3 months of operation, according to A biang, the price of the mining machine even abruptly increased by two to three thousand. Of course, this has nothing to do with cost, it's just a "marketing tool".
"It's not good if the price is lowered. It means that your asset is depreciating. The more it rises, the better. Therefore, our prices will increase in steps. The goods are still the same batch of goods."
Raising prices can also create the "illusion" that the cost of entering the market first is lower than that of entering the market later. According to All Weather Technology Report, one of the marketing strategies of snail mining machines is to issue a price adjustment notice, "each mining machine will increase by 3,000 yuan", which has caused many investors to hoard a large number of machines on the eve of the price increase.
According to A biang's observation, 2018 is the best time for Filecoin to sell.
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"I can't stay in this business"
If the maintenance of a business mainly depends on poor cognition and opacity, with the flow of information, it may not last long.
Competition among peers inevitably exposes and criticizes each other, coupled with the attention of the outside world, there are more and more voices openly questioning Filecoin mining machines.
At the same time, the traffic of this project, which has been sweeping the currency circle and the disk circle for a year, seems to have peaked. "There are fewer and fewer people who believe in it. It's not like before that every game can convert a few customers."
By February 2019, the expected launch of the mainnet was postponed for the second time (Filecoin's earliest plan was to launch the mainnet in June 2018, just like EOS), which also dealt a big blow to many agents and investors.
From then on, A biang began to wonder, "Is there something wrong with this project?"
"I also doubted it when I first started on the road. These mining machines are like money printing machines, and all kinds of high returns seem unrealistic. But since I chose (sell) it, I convinced myself that it is true. Thinking about it in the worst case This sense of disparity is unacceptable.”
But now, thinking that no one can guarantee that the next launch date will not be "pigeoned" (if the mainnet is not launched, your own hosting income will not be realized), and the risks warned by the snail mining machine and the "industry dividend peaked", Ah Biang's faith began to waver.
After playing for several months, Ah biang officially retired.
"Customers don't pay the bill, profits are thin, and there is no idea about this thing. Maybe something will happen, and I can't stay here."
Afterwards, several of Abiang's agents at the same level and half of his lower-level agents also left one after another. Dozens of colleagues who were once active have gradually disappeared.
Even the above-mentioned "top ten mining machine brands" that are well-known in the Filecoin arena, most of them have disappeared.
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Screenshot from: Maya mining machine official website
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Newcomers enter the market, can "good money" drive out "bad money"?
On December 11, 2019, Filecoin opened the test network, and miners from all walks of life finally had a real testing ground. Although the tokens mined on the testnet are worthless, mining machine manufacturers such as 1475 are still participating in the test to find bugs and improve the Filecoin network.
When the second phase of the test was launched on May 15, the speed of Filecoin's copy proof mining was doubled, and the feasibility of each code was verified. Officials expect that if there is no accident, the main network will be launched from the end of July to mid-August this year.
Filecoin, which has been postponed for two years and is just around the corner, has not only attracted more and more attention, but people's arguments have also begun to turn, while wallets such as Trustwalle have announced their support for FIL with practical actions.
"Li Bai in the currency circle" clearly remembers that at that time, the team was at the end of the development of the HandShake (HNS) ASIC mining machine, and some technical teams researching zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proofs suddenly appeared on the market. After understanding, it turns out that these people are all Filecoin mining machine manufacturers.
In the Filecoin project, the achievable effect of zk-SNARKs is that the verifier can judge whether the miner has honestly copied and saved the user's data based on the proof results of zk-SNARKs without looking at the specific files stored by the miner. files, which not only saves consumption, but also protects user privacy.
Therefore, effectively running the zk-SNARKs part of the proof (mining) process is a basic requirement for Filecoin mining software and hardware.
However, due to the fact that cryptography technology is too profound, few people usually dabble in it, so many teams are almost "learning and using it now".
"Currency Circle Li Bai" and his team had previously developed a Layer 2 privacy protocol and had a better understanding of zk-SNARKs, so they resolutely entered the manufacturing of Filecoin mining machines after finishing the research and development of HNS mining machines.
Of course, being one's own director is only a small part of the reason. Li Bai's team sees a greater opportunity because Filecoin carries a hope of overturning tradition. After three years of painstaking research and development, it has finally entered the eve of the formation and explosion of the ecological chain. Although there are risks, it is worth taking a gamble for such a king-level project.
Also decided to test water mining and Keystore. The company, which takes secure storage of private keys as its core business, has been researching how to better provide information protection, data privacy and secure storage.
"The decision to come in is not only because of the direct coupling between Filecoin and our business planning, but more importantly because of the broad market demand." Keystore Marketing Director Jia Xudong told Odaily.
From January to the present, the Keystore team has contacted many institutional users who want to mine Filecoin, which can be roughly divided into two categories:
One is the public/private investors of Filecoin. They are still optimistic about Filecoin, and mining is a way to obtain FIL at a lower cost. Therefore, mining Filecoin can be understood as continuing to increase their positions.
The other category is a small number of large Bitcoin miners.
Note the attribute "few". Most Bitcoin miners will reject Filecoin for various reasons. The biggest reason is that Bitcoin miners hardly mine other currencies, and Filecoin mining was once famous for its capital market, which made many miners dismissive; there are also some who do not reject new currencies, but hold Filecoin distributed storage business. Those who are skeptical think that it may be suppressed by regulation like TON; there are also conservative miners, because there is no reliable investment income model in Filecoin mining in the early stage, which makes them discouraged.
But there are always risk-loving miners who will use a small part of their assets to "invest in trends".
In fact, smart miners should have realized that at the moment when the block production is reduced and the currency price is sideways for a long time but the participants continue to raise money, Bitcoin mining also has a ceiling. If you are not careful, you may fall into a loss, and invest in Filecoin mining. Mine may be no different.
In the interview, Odaily saw a mining farm with an investment of over 100 million yuan, planning to put 10% of the funds into Filecoin mining. This scale of funds is not small for the current Filecoin mining market, and it is currently negotiating cooperation with leading mining machine manufacturers.
The influx of institutional-level new miners and new miners will undoubtedly bring about a positive promotion of "good coins driving out bad coins" for the previously chaotic Filecoin mining market.
Take the pomegranate mining pool as an example. It started to participate in mining when the second test was launched. With less than 10 mining machines, it rushed to the ninth place in the Filecoin computing power list. Among them, the cumulative computing power of a single mining machine can reach 300GB per day. Compared with some mining machines with a computing power of only 200GB on the computing power list, it has a certain efficiency improvement advantage.
On May 21, Pomegranate Pool suddenly made its hardware scheme public, which aroused the attention of the community.
As mentioned earlier, since 2018, Filecoin manufacturers have begun to sell various mining machines, and because they are futures, Filecoin mining machines are as unknown to investors as black boxes.
The original intention of Pomegranate Mining Pool to announce the hardware solution is to provide reference for ordinary investors and some manufacturers who are not professional enough. Just as the open source of mining pool software can stimulate the birth of more mining pools and promote the decentralization of computing power, the hardware solutions that Filecoin miners have hidden for two years are made public, which undoubtedly has more advantages than disadvantages for the industry.
Producing R&D machines is a way for mining machine manufacturers to make money. The solution has been open-sourced, and what everyone has to compete for is the availability and maturity of software, operation and maintenance services, etc., thereby stimulating the in-depth development of the industry.
It's a pity that A biang and his client who entered hastily failed to catch up with such a good time.
When he quit, A biang calculated the harvest he had participated in for a year. "Not counting the revenue share of future custody, selling hardware alone is a sum of money, but the dozens of mining machines have not started to produce coins, and have not changed hands, so I have been busy for a year, and I just made a 'stuck' .”
The Filecoin mainnet will be launched soon, and he has no idea that his mining machine can mine FIL. "The big deal is to sell the hardware at a 40% discount," A biang thought.
However, it is still unknown whether the manufacturer can deliver the mining machine. Whether the funds collected two years ago are used to purchase mining machines, whether there are operating losses and oversold are all risk points.
It is conceivable that the launch of Filecoin will lead to a number of "snail mining machine" scams. At that time, the "rich train" that investors embark on will head towards the cliff.
A biang is both a pyramid schemer and a victim, and he has a lot of emotion. But for rights protection, he has no hope.
"It is written in the sales contract that this machine is sold without refund, unless the coins cannot be mined. If the manufacturer buys a small amount of coins through the secondary market and sends them to you, it will be said that the machine dug it, and you have nothing to do."
More platforms have been shut down, and the project party has entered a state of long-term disconnection, such as the Maya mining machine mentioned above. And, two years after the fraud, did the user consciously preserve the evidence? If you really want to defend your rights, these situations are not optimistic.
Finally, A biang suggested that investors who are looking for an opportunity to enter the market should never All In for such high-risk projects, and do what they can, and they are still early investors if they join after the project is launched. Don't have "faith" easily.
"Investment is investment, it depends on returns and controls risks."
