Editor's Note: This article comes fromDeepChain (ID: deepchain-eva)Editor's Note: This article comes from
DeepChain (ID: deepchain-eva)
DeepChain (ID: deepchain-eva)
, Author: Bu Er Do, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Filecoin is on fire.
"Compared with the popularity of previous years and this year, it is really not the same." Interstellar Vision Nancy was in the middle of a meeting when she was interviewed by DeepChain.
Under the epidemic, compared with the bleak cryptocurrency market, Filecoin/IPFS has been full of vitality recently.
On June 14, Angie Maguire, a Filecoin business developer, said that the main network of the project will be launched this summer. According to the public roadmap, the Filecoin mainnet is expected to be launched in the time window from July 20th to August 20th. And this is the result of multiple bounced votes.
Although the mainnet is ready to launch and there are frequent benefits, Kevin, a veteran Filecoin player, told DeepChain that he does not plan to participate.
"How to play? Before the mainnet is online, my mining machine dealer is gone, and my money is gone."
Previously, due to the delay in the launch of the mainnet, the Filecoin ecosystem was full of monsters and ghosts, and various scams were rampant.
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The miner ran away, leaving me a pile of scrap metal
"I was cheated." Keivn told DeepChian in the first sentence of the phone call that he was fighting eagles all day long and was finally pecked by the eagles.
As an "old leek" who entered the cryptocurrency field in 2016, years of experience have given Kevin a pair of "sharp eyes".
"Whether it's a pyramid scheme or not, I can tell at a glance." Kevin told DeepChain, "Understanding the mode of the fund market, sometimes I can have the courage to grab a handful of wool in it."
In the early days, Kevin was just a white-collar worker working in Beijing. Later, he accidentally learned about blockchain, Bitcoin and various funds. Focus on the capital market, move in and out of each market, lose less and win more, allowing yourself to accumulate a lot of wealth.
Then, Kevin lost his hand in the Filecoin field.
In 2017, Kevin came to Shenzhen on a business trip and met a friend.
Under the introduction of a friend, Kevin came into contact with the IPFS/Filecoin mining machine for the first time. The distributed storage feature of Filecoin aroused his interest.
That is, on August 10 of this year, Filecoin started its own ICO process and raised $257 million in just one month, making it the largest ICO project at that time.
Surprised by the amazing potential of Filecoin, Kevin took out the 600,000 he earned from other projects to invest in Filecoin.
"At that time, Filecoin officially announced that the mainnet would be launched at the end of 2017, and it was already September of that year when I entered the game."
The cost of three months is acceptable to Kevin. So I chose a company that focused on Filecoin mining at that time: Interstellar Starting Point.
At that time, StarStart claimed that a 4T mining machine was priced at 4,000 yuan, but because the main network had not yet been launched, it could only mine other tokens. After the main network was launched, the previously mined Tokens could be used to exchange for FIL ( Filecoin pass), those Tokens mined before can also be traded and realized.
"It sounds good to me. I bought about 150 units in one go and placed them in Zhejiang." Kevin told DeepChain, "All 600,000 All IN went in."
Full of confidence, Kevin thought he could use this to make a big splash, but after mining for a month or two, Kevin was told that these mining machines could no longer mine due to technical problems.
What's even more exasperating is that the mined tokens cannot be traded and realized at all, and no one is willing to buy them.
At this time, Kevin realized that he had been cheated.
When I contacted the starting point of StarCraft and said that I wanted a refund, the starting point of StarCraft said that the goods had been sold and would not be returned or exchanged. It was impossible to get a full refund. Either the mining machine was discounted and returned in batches, or it was resold to others.
"This is simply a robber." At that time, I didn't accept the two options, so I turned around and chose to call the police, and then there was no more.
"Later, I pulled the mining machine back and sold some of it. I sold the mining machine and recovered 100,000 yuan, but the remaining 500,000 yuan will never be returned."
Today, the interstellar starting point, like other fleeting funds, has long since disappeared.
And Kevin, because of heavy losses, did not have enough capital to participate in the Bitcoin carnival at the end of 2017, and missed the chance to get rich.
The mining machine manufacturer ran away, leaving only a pile of broken copper and iron.
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The scam of parasitic Filecoin made a fortune of 1.3 billion
Kevin was deceived in 2017, when Filecoin had just experienced its first wave of popularity.
Beginning on August 10, 2017 and ending about a month later on September 7, Filecoin raised $205 million from the public. Plus the US$52 million previously invested by well-known investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Andreessen Horowitz.
So much so that many people began to wonder whether Filecoin was a scam project.
Filecoin received a total of US$257 million in financing, which was the highest priced ICO project at the time and attracted the attention of many people inside and outside the cryptocurrency field.
However, to the great disappointment of people, Filecoin opened high and low, holding huge financing, but its testnet and mainnet skipped votes one after another.
So much so that many people began to wonder whether Filecoin was a scam project.
Filecoin is not a scam project, but scammers and scams have been staring at the fat meat of Filecoin.
Among them, the most famous scam is "Snail interstellar mining machine fraud of 1.36 billion yuan".
On October 29, 2018, the "2018 Central Plains Silicon Valley First (International) Innovation and Technology Ceremony and the World's Only Storage Application Ecological CAI R&D Launch Conference" was held in Zhengzhou.
At this conference, Henan Lianxin Technology Co., Ltd. introduced the protagonist of the day-"Snail Interstellar Mining Machine" to hundreds of participants at the scene.
At the meeting, the organizer publicly declared that its mining machine can mine CAI and Filecoin at the same time. When Filecoin is not online, it can pre-mine CAI first, and then exchange CAI for Filecoin.
This is exactly the same as Kevin's experience above.
In order to encourage everyone to buy more mining machines, Lianxin Company also resorted to the marketing strategy of "the more mining machines, the more coins produced".
Simply put, a single "snail interstellar mining machine" can only produce 47 CAI tokens a day. If you buy 100 units together for joint mining, each mining machine can produce 70 CAI per day.
At that time, the price of CAI rose from 0.1 yuan to 2 yuan, so investors looked at the CAI dug out of their mobile phones and the rising currency price every day, and no one thought of selling it.
However, one day, a certain investor’s community suddenly had a power outage for more than 10 hours. The investor suddenly found that although the mining machine was powered off, the number of CAI was still increasing.
Investors are beginning to realize that the so-called CAI mining by mining machines may be just a gimmick by Lianxin.
On February 14, 2019, two announcements made by AT Exchange and Lianxin Company respectively aggravated the investor's concerns.
In the announcement, AT Exchange announced that due to the hacker attack on the platform, it decided to temporarily suspend all withdrawal operations and freeze related transactions for 3 months until all technical problems are eliminated.
However, the promise of Lianxin Company has not been fulfilled. The so-called move to the United States is nothing but a public escape. The liar of Snail Star is finally exposed.
In March 2019, the Zhengzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau filed a case for investigation into the "Suspected Fund-raising Fraud Case of Henan Lianxin Technology Co., Ltd."
After investigation, the funds involved in the case reached as high as 2 billion yuan, and more than 7,000 victims were involved. However, Huo Dong, the actual controller of Henan Lianxin Technology Co., Ltd., has already left overseas.
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The reason behind Filecoin chaos
Snail Interstellar is a typical "one machine, two mining" model scam, and this model is also one of the classic routines of Filecoin ecological fraud.
"In the early days, many manufacturers claimed that one machine could mine more than one machine, and that they could participate in other mining benefits while mining FIL. Anyone who understands the principles of Filecoin mining should know that Filecoin mining is packaged within the specified time Constantly submit PoSt verification in a fixed cycle, and the miners simply have no spare time to do other work.” Will from Interstellar Vision told DeepChain.
In addition, the price of a single Snail StarCraft is 5,875 yuan, but if you buy accessories from Taobao, the cost is less than 1,000 yuan.
In addition to Snail Interstellar, Mr. Bi, who previously threw money in Hong Kong, is also a "predecessor" in the Filecoin mining machine scam.
In June 2018, Mr. Bi sold mining machines to his fans and taught them to speculate on Filecoin, claiming that buying his mining machines would "pay back the cost in three months, and double it in two years."
The price of his mining machine is as high as 25,000 Hong Kong dollars.
However, in the purchase contract, except for the hard disk capacity, he did not mention the rest of the configuration. It wasn't until the fans disassembled the mining machine that the production date of the accessories turned out to be 2012.
Master Bi's fake mining machine scam was immediately discovered.
In addition to fake mining machines, there is another Filecoin cloud computing scam on the market. If you can actually get a few hard drives by buying a mining machine, then the cloud computing scam is completely empty.
Why are there a lot of scams in the Filecoin field?
Of course, scams always like to wear the cloak of emerging technologies, where there are hot spots, there are them.
In addition, in the view of Zhou Huan, founder of IPFS.Fund, on the one hand, due to the complicated technical principles of Filecoin, and on the other hand, due to the delay in launching the main network of Filecoin, various reasons have caused the mining machines on the market today. Good and evil are mixed together, and it is difficult to distinguish true from false.
As a star project in the blockchain field, the technical principles of Filecoin are obscure and difficult to understand. To truly understand it, a certain threshold is required, and this threshold often becomes an obstacle for investors to distinguish the authenticity.
At this time, scammers take advantage of the situation and use various gimmicks and half-truths to build a fake project. Investors with poor vigilance can easily fall into the trap of scammers.
In addition, Filecoin has repeatedly bounced tickets, and there is no parameter standard for Filecoin mining machines. This also gives scammers the opportunity to lure investors through shoddy or even non-existent mining machines. After all, before the mainnet goes live, everyone I don't know if the mining machine in my hand can mine or not, and whether it is a real mining machine.
"If you look carefully at Juan's Twitter, you will find that they have nothing to say about the entire ecological governance except for posting some content about the technical progress of the project." A Filecoin participant told DeepChain, "Official No matter, it is also the reason why liars are rampant.”
In fact, after two scams related to Filecoin appeared in mainland China and Hong Kong in 2018, Filecoin's anti-fraud statement came late at the end of that year.
The project is hot, the threshold of awareness is high, the progress is slow, the lack of official governance and other external reasons, coupled with the internal reason of the parasitism of scammers, have led to the Filecoin ecological mud and mud, and good and evil are mixed.
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There are very few opportunities for retail investors to participate
On May 15 this year, Protocol Labs officially announced the official launch of the second phase of the Filecoin testnet. With the launch of the testnet, there will be 1 million FIL rewards. For a while, the topic of Filecoin has become the focus of the cryptocurrency field.
In an AMA on May 19, Juan, the founder of Filecoin, also pleased to list the distribution of Filecoin's global miners at the end of the question and answer and said "how great this looks".
After two years of silence, Filecoin once again stood at the C position on the stage, especially after the news that the mainnet was about to go live came out.
According to Cannon Xie, the time for the Filecoin mainnet launch is stable between July 20 and August 20, and there will be no delays.
As a private equity investor of Filecoin, Dapao Xie said that he has received an email, and Filecoin officially expects to issue coins in late August.
In addition, it tracks the code of Filecoin every day and finds that there are no major function updates at present. It is basically to fix small bugs and optimize small functions. It is in the final stage of the project, so basically the online time is relatively stable.
In fact, the market has already given due reflection on the launch of the Filecoin mainnet.
Major Filecoin mining machine manufacturers have frequently appeared in the media, and the computing power and block generation data of the test network have also become a strong proof of the strength of their mining machines.
In addition, futures FIL has also risen with the good news, and even other project currencies that focus on distributed storage have also skyrocketed.
"Compared with previous years, this year's popularity is really not the same." Nancy told DeepChain, "Last year, no media was willing to cooperate with us on Filecoin content, but this year you have also seen that various conferences are overwhelming. , we are also very busy."
If it is said that because the project has not made much progress before, scammers are rampant, and investment is easy to be cheated, then after the mining machine scam has been repeatedly exposed, is it time to buy a mining machine and invest in Filecoin when the Filecoin mainnet is on the line?
The answer is not as optimistic as everyone thinks.
First of all, there are still scams under the guise of Filecoin on the market, but with the passage of time and elimination, these scams have become more hidden and difficult to distinguish.
In addition, even if there is no scam, for ordinary investors, the current mining machine investment threshold is still extremely high.
Taking the ranking on the testnet as an example, many mining machine manufacturers use the ranking as a gimmick to sell mining machines, but although the ranking is public, users do not know how many machines were used and how much it cost to obtain this ranking.
"When you inspect mining machines, you should not only look at the ranking, but also look at how many machines were used and how much money was invested to obtain the ranking. Most ordinary investors are unable to distinguish this point, and some operation and maintenance are required. Professional friends can refer to it together, and let the mining machine manufacturer open the operation and maintenance background of the test machine.” Zhou Huan said.
