Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Special thanks to 6Block Pomegranate Mining Pool for providing professional guidance for this article
Investment opportunities related to IPFS have become the most popular hot spot in the digital currency industry recently.
OdailyPrevious article"Capital Circle Enters Filecoin Mining"After it was issued, many readers asked the author in private messages, "My family plans to invest in XX manufacturer, please help me to see if it is reliable or not".
Even Tieba, Hupu, etc. have appeared a lot of posts like "I recently discovered that my mother is addicted to a coin mining software called IPFS".
Under the heat, the number of manufacturers selling mining machines and computing power in the market has surged, and many manufacturers are using one-sided information and data to deceive investors and conduct false propaganda.
In the face of opacity and poor information, investors will inevitably fall into "logical misunderstandings". Typical are:
It is believed that miners who can be listed on the testnet computing power list are reliable;
Believe in the rate of return and payback period promised by miners;
When you see a big coffee platform and have cooperation with big companies, you will trust miners;
Select mining machines based on single indicators such as "cost per T" and "packaging speed";
Under the premise of not doing their homework well, the miners rushed to invest under the influence of publicity such as "dividing up the testnet tokens", "grabbing the beachhead", "the price of the machine will increase next month"...
Under the guidance of this logic, investors who are slightly unlucky are likely to lose all their money. One or two sentences about technical strength are not clear, and there is no relevant authoritative information for inquiries at present. How to identify the reliability of miners has become a "life-saving skill" that investors urgently need to master.
secondary title
What dimensions can be used to judge whether a manufacturer is reliable?
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Our chat records in the group
There are three publicity points that David was moved by Zhiheyun:
The price of the mining machine is 22,800-35,800 yuan/node, which is far cheaper than the 60,000-70,000-70,000/unit mining machine on the market, and there are no other charges (hosting fees, technical service fees) except for the mining machine, and the hosting period is as long as 5 year (normally 1 year);
Promise or imply that the capital will be recovered in one month, and the annualized return will be 100%;
The first systematic strategic cooperation with the "big miners on the list".
In the eyes of professionals, these beautiful publicity points are full of loopholes, but investors believe them to be true.
In order to help investors identify the parameters of manufacturers and mining machines, Odaily, together with 6Block Pomegranate Mining Pool, proposed a set of evaluation systems covering the three latitudes of mining business fundamentals, mining machine/cloud computing power sales plan details, and market wind evaluation. Take the nine major miners as an example for evaluation.
Established
Established
Is it possible to sell mining machines when the mining code is undetermined?
Investors and partners
Whether to contribute code in the community
The 15 indicators of mining machine cost performance include:
Hardware configuration, including CPU, memory, hard disk capacity, packaging speed
Mining machine, operation and maintenance and technical service charging standards, cost-effective
When the computing power is full, whether it supports expansion, the annual cumulative computing power when not expanding, etc.
The 2 indicators of market wind assessment include:
Publicly reported whether there is any negative news
Whether there are any negative comments in the community (WeChat, Weibo, Tieba, etc.) and investors
secondary title
Who is the most reliable among the nine major miners?
After collecting and organizing by Odaily, the comprehensive evaluation of the 9 major miners is as follows.
Let's look at them one by one.
(1) Fundamentals
Judging from the time of establishment, except for Pomegranate Pool and KeyPool, all other miners were established in mid-2018.
Filecoin was expected to be launched on the mainnet at the same time as EOS (June 2018). Unexpectedly, this "pigeon" lasted for two years, and it was really difficult for miners who "came into being".
In order to survive, miners have released many "fake mining machines". For example, Starland, Xi’an Lingdong, 1475 and Force Zone launched the first batch of mining machines (cloud computing power) as early as the first half of 2018-2019, all of which used Intel processors that are not suitable for the current mining algorithm, and the mining efficiency is low Can't even run directly. How miners solve this legacy problem will be detailed in the "Risk Points" section below.
Look at investors and partners.
Among the publicly available information of the nine major miners, three have raised funds, including 1475, the newly established pomegranate mining pool and KeyPool this year.
In April 2020, 1475 announced that it has received capital injections from HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, and Emer Capital, with a post-investment valuation of 400 million yuan. In June, Quantum Chain (Qtum) announced the completion of an angel investment of US$2 million in Pomegranate Pool. The parent company of KeyPool, Keystore, an enterprise-level encrypted asset service provider, received an investment of tens of millions of dollars from Jianyuan Fund and Fenbushi Capital in January this year.
Compared with capital, technical capabilities are more important to miners. For this point, we can verify from the side whether the miner participates in the code contribution of the mainnet/testnet.
In terms of code contribution, a number of technicians from the Force Zone and Pomegranate Pool have contributed to the official code base, and two team members were invited to join the Filecoin Security Research Team (FSRF). Both 1475 and Pomegranate Pool contributed to Officially submitted the testnet core BUG.
In general, Force Zone, 1475 and Pomegranate Mining Pool participated in the development of the main network and actively searched for bugs, and their technical strength is obvious to all. Investors are a plus.
(2) Mining machine performance & cost performance
Next, let’s look at the most hard-core mining machine/cloud computing power performance competition.
Because among the above-mentioned miners, Xianhe System does not sell products directly to retail investors, and Force Zone and KeyPool only sell cloud computing power, so the table below compares the 15 profiles of the remaining 6 major miners’ mining machines one by one. If you plan to buy a mining machine recently, this picture will undoubtedly be a good helper for you.
Before comparing the data, let's look at the first item, the degree of information disclosure.
Due to the opacity of information in Filecoin mining, there have been many scams that "only promise income, no configuration instructions". Therefore, a very important inspection point for selecting mining machines/miners is the degree of information disclosure. The more hardware parameters a manufacturer discloses, investors can confirm its credibility through horizontal comparisons.
The nine major manufacturers mentioned in this article have different performances in terms of information transparency, and they are divided into the following categories from high to low:
Transparent, such as Pomegranate Pool and KeyPool, publish detailed hardware configuration and test results, and be transparent enough among miners;
It is more transparent, such as 1475, point storage, and publishes general hardware parameters and cost-effective parameters;
Not very transparent, such as space-time cloud, force zone and interstellar continent, do not take the initiative to announce specific hardware parameters, packaging speed, cost performance and other parameters, but investors can get it if they ask the sales manager;
It is not transparent. Among all miners, Xianhe System does not disclose mining machine data because of its To B sales model. Except for price and computing power, other parameters of Xi'an Lingdong are difficult to obtain.
In this regard, the founder and chairman of Xi'an Lingdong told Odaily that the company has a variety of selection plans when testing and selecting models. Affected by the shortage, subsequent configurations may change to some extent, and it is difficult to achieve unified standardization.
In terms of the processor and memory parameters of the mining machine, half of the manufacturers have made public. 1475, pomegranate pool and point storage basically use AMD32 core processors and 512GB of memory, and the low configuration version of pomegranate pool (priced at 130,000 yuan) uses 256GB Memory. It is worth noting that there are different models of AMD32-core processors, and the corresponding prices are not the same.
In terms of hard disk storage capacity, the pomegranate mining pool has the highest configuration. The high-end mining machine (priced at 244,000 yuan) is equipped with a 336TB hard disk, which is 130% higher than the 1475 mining machine at the same price (priced at 248,000 yuan).
Next, look at the hard power of each company - packaging speed. Before looking at the data we need to know two things.
First, what does package speed mean?
Filecoin's mining algorithm consists of two parts: PoRep copy proof (used to verify that the miner has stored the file as required), and PoSt storage proof (that is, the copy proof is continuously generated to prove that the miner has been storing the file). A mining machine must first pass PoRep and store files in the hard disk (32GB minimum) before it can become an effective computing power to participate in block production. Therefore, the speed of storing files in the PoRep link (that is, the packaging speed, unit: GB/h) has become one of the most important indicators to measure the performance of the mining machine.
Secondly, how to use the packaging speed to see the pros and cons of the mining machine?
Knowing the packaging speed, we can calculate: the cost performance of the mining machine, the theoretical daily income of mining, and the time it takes for the mining machine to fill up the storage.
First of all, the cost performance of the mining machine is the ratio between the unit output and the unit input. The larger the ratio, the higher the cost performance of the mining machine. In the case that the fundamentals of the manufacturers are not much different, this is the most important indicator for choosing a mining machine.
The general cost-effective calculation formula in the industry is
Cost performance of the whole machine = packaging speed / selling price
From this, a value with a unit of GB/h/10,000 yuan is obtained, which represents the packaging capacity obtained by purchasing the entire mining machine.
But some people think that it is not scientific to simply measure output by packaging speed. If the hard disk capacity (theoretical computing power) of the two mining machines is 100T, then it is meaningful to compare the packaging speed, but if it is a mining machine with different hard disk capacity, for example, the hard disk capacity of the pomegranate mining machine mentioned above is 1.3 times that of the competition , its hard disk investment and final output are several times that of its competitors, but it is not reflected in this formula.
To this end, it is necessary for us to add another index: cost performance after deducting storage costs.
Cost performance after deducting storage cost = packaging speed / (sale price + shipping fee - storage cost)
It deducts the storage cost and represents the pure packaging capacity obtained per 10,000 yuan, and the unit is also G/h/10,000 yuan.
Calculation method of storage cost: Miners usually announce the model and specification of the hard disk, and most of them use Western Digital and Seagate hard disks, and the prices of these traditional accessories are relatively transparent. Usually, the profit is not made through the price difference of the hardware, so the storage cost of a certain mining machine can be calculated.
Secondly, the packaging speed can calculate the theoretical daily income of mining.
Suppose you bought a mining machine with a hard drive size of 100T, how do you calculate your daily income? It depends on how big your effective storage (computing power) is. On the first day of mainnet launch, your effective storage will accumulate from zero
Effective daily storage = packaging speed (GB/h) * 24h
No matter how the computing power of the entire network changes, the encapsulation speed determines your daily computing power and cumulative computing power, and also determines the proportion of your effective storage in the entire network and the possibility (income) of block generation.
Mining theoretical daily income = cumulative effective storage / effective storage of the entire network * (daily coin production - mortgage amount) * currency price
Of course, this is only a theoretical gain. In addition to the impact of packaging speed, the actual gain also cannot be ignored due to factors such as design operation and maintenance stability, mining pool burst rate and other factors.
Third, the packing speed also calculates the time it takes for the miner to fill up the storage.
Hard disk full storage time = hard disk size / effective daily storage * 1024
Hard disk full storage time = hard disk size / effective daily storage * 1024
It has been paved for a long time, just for everyone to understand the data more clearly.
In terms of packaging speed, Space-Time Cloud, 1475 and Dianku Technology are the fastest, all reaching 90+GB/h. Correspondingly, it takes the shortest time to fill up the hard disk, which can be realized within 2-3 months after the mainnet goes live . (It should be noted that the encapsulation speed of 1475 and point storage is calculated by Odaily based on the price/performance ratio announced by it.)
The maximum packaging speed of Pomegranate Pool and Interstellar Continent is nearly 30% slower than the above three companies, and it takes a relatively longer time to fill up; and because the hard disk of Pomegranate Pool is the largest, it takes about 7 months to fully store the hard disk.
Here it is necessary for us to discuss the issue of whether follow-up investment is required after the hard disk is full.
Many people instinctively think that the mining machine will perform its best function when the hard disk is full, but this is not the case.
The Filecoin mining machine is mainly composed of three parts, computing equipment, storage equipment and GPU. What is the proportion of storage, that is, hard disk, to the total cost? According to the statistics of Odaily, the ratio of storage cost to selling price of the six major miners is mostly between 15-21%. Only the pomegranate mining pool with the largest hard disk has a storage cost of 32-34%.
If your mining machine does not add disks after the hard disk is full, it means that the computing equipment and GPU (more than 75% of the investment) you have invested in tens of thousands will become disposable items, just to obtain 100 T of effective storage . What's even more frightening is that if you haven't realized that the storage is scalable and you want to get more computing power, so you choose to buy mining machines in large quantities at one time, the investment in computing equipment and GPUs will be even more wasteful.
Of course, after the custody period expires (1-3 years) and you get the mining machine, you can also sell it and recover the residual value. However, due to the long service life, your hardware is bound to be severely discounted.
For this reason, Pomegranate Pool has added larger hard drives for users by default, allowing users to obtain as high a computing power as possible at one time.
The last item of data in the table is the annual cumulative computing power that users can obtain without expansion (it is the statistics of the daily cumulative computing power of mining machines).
The data shows that the annual cumulative effective storage capacity of the pomegranate mining machine is the highest, reaching 87360TB, followed by space-time cloud (62400TB) and interstellar continent (59136TB), 1475 (48168TB) and point storage (40560TB) are the lowest. The annual cumulative effective storage capacity of the pomegranate mining pool can reach up to 2.15 times the point deposit.
If the users of 1475 and Diande want to keep the computing equipment and GPU of the mining machine from being idle within one year, they need to re-invest at least 4-6 times, and the cumulative re-investment is about 180,000-216,000 yuan, which can account for 87% of the initial investment. %-95%.
Regarding these figures, have you considered all of these figures when you plan to purchase mining machines?
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For the convenience of comparison, put this comparison picture again
The market price of Filecoin mining machines is generally divided into 3 levels, high configuration mining machines of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan, medium configuration mining machines of 60,000 to 130,000 yuan, and low configuration mining machines of less than 60,000 yuan.
With these mining machines with such a large price difference, investors should try to equip them with the best performance mining machines, or mining machines within their own capabilities (for example, some people will buy "cheap" mining machines with a price of about 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. machine)?
In fact, both ideas are wrong. Investors should indeed do what they can, but more importantly, they should use their money wisely and choose cost-effective mining machines.
From the perspective of cost-effectiveness of the whole machine, among the six major miners, Diancun has become the "king of cost-effectiveness" due to its high packaging speed and low price, followed by Space-Time Cloud and 1475. The pomegranate mining pool is at the bottom.
From the perspective of cost performance after deducting storage costs, Space-Time Cloud and Point Storage are the highest, reaching 5+GB/h/10,000 yuan, followed by 1475, which is 4+GB/h/10,000 yuan. Low.
In addition to mining machines, users also need to pay operation and maintenance fees and technical service fees for mining.
Among the 6 miners, 1475, Interstellar Continent and Lingdong Technology pack the two together and charge a total of 25-30% of the revenue as a service fee, while Space-Time Cloud, Pomegranate Pool and Dian Deposit charge a fixed fee for technical service fees. The price is RMB 8,000-18,000/set/year, and the technical service fee is 15%-20% of the income.
Which of these two models is better?
Assuming that you believe that you can pay back your capital in one year, it means that your annual income = total investment in mining. At this time, you can calculate the difference between different percentages. Taking Space-Time Cloud and Interstellar Continent with the same price but different charging methods as examples, the service fee charged by the former = 1.8 + revenue * 20%, calculated to be 61,500 yuan, while the service fee charged by the latter is 76,000 yuan.
It can be seen that there are certain disadvantages in high rake ratio, and as the currency price rises, the potential income of users becomes larger, and the cost of rake is also higher.
But for this data, Interstellar Continent has its own views.
A sales manager of Interstellar Continent said that after Interstellar Continental set a ratio of 25%, some manufacturers only charged 20%, 15% or even lower in order to compete. "But you have to know that this ratio is actually meaningless before it goes online. If there are too many participants and the currency price goes down, we may even risk losing money by charging 25% commission without charging a fixed fee. I think This is a sharing method that advances and retreats with customers, and the practice of collecting cash in advance to shield the risk that the manufacturer’s custody cannot pay back is two strategies.”
So far, we have made a comprehensive analysis of the plans of various miners to sell mining machines. To sum up, each of the six major miners has advantages and disadvantages.
Space-Time Cloud and point-storage mining machines have fast packaging speed and high cost performance. The service charging model is to charge a fixed fee for operation and maintenance, plus a small revenue commission. There are no "flaws" in various performances. It is for performance , cost-effective choice.
In the middle are 1475 and Pomegranate Pool. The 1475 performs well in terms of packaging speed and cost performance, but the fly in the ointment may be a relatively high commission rate. The pomegranate mining pool has the highest hard disk capacity, the highest annual effective storage capacity without expansion, and the lowest service charge. However, due to the slow packaging speed of the mining machine, the packaging speed per 10,000 yuan is lower.
At the bottom of the list is Interstellar Land, which does not perform well in terms of packaging speed and cost performance, and at the same time has a high percentage of commission.
(3) Cloud computing power
Among the 9 major miners, 5 sell cloud computing power to retail investors, namely Force Zone, Time Space Cloud, Lingdong Technology and KeyPool. The remaining three companies only sell cloud computing power to large players.
Since many miners did not provide performance indicators such as packaging speed, the comparison of cloud computing power mainly starts from five aspects: selling price, minimum purchase T number, technical service fee, interest cycle and income calculation method.
First of all, the income of the five miners is calculated in the same way, based on the proportion of computing power purchased by users in the mining pool.
Suppose you bought 1TB of computing power from a certain miner. In the early stage of mining, it will take a certain amount of time to fill the hard disk. The user's "paper" computing power has not yet become effective computing power, and the user's income will be calculated according to the amount he earned in the mine. The proportion of the pool, divide the effective computing power of the mining pool. This calculation method still applies after the hard disk is full.
Except for the contract period of KeyPool cloud computing power which is 3 years, the contract period of the other 4 miners is 1 year.
The person in charge of KeyPool told Odaily that the user will not be charged separately for the second two years of the contract, which means that the user can enjoy a longer mining cycle for 2,000 yuan.
If KeyPool can continue to operate within the contract period, it is equivalent to the user's investment of 700 yuan/T/year, and the price is the lowest among many miners, only 1/3 of the rest. Such a large price difference will inevitably confuse users. Is it because the mining efficiency of its computing power is relatively low?
Odaily asked KeyPool about this, and it said that the price/performance ratio of the guaranteed computing power is 4.2G/h/10,000 yuan, and the full deposit time is 6 months.
In comparison, Lingdong Technology has the highest single-T price and service charge, reaching 2,200 yuan/T and 30% of the revenue.
As far as the minimum purchase threshold is concerned, the Force Zone is the highest, and the minimum investment for 20T is 42,000 yuan, which seems to deviate from the "small investment" positioning of cloud computing power. At the same time, Force Zone is also a manufacturer that only has cloud computing power and does not sell mining machines separately.
(4) Risk assessment & risk points
On the whole, the nine major miners mentioned in the text have good reputation and no negative news. From the perspective of the investor community, people are skeptical about whether these miners can fulfill their promises and provide cost-effective mining services. Perhaps only after the mainnet is launched and users actually use the mining machines will they have further "experience" Report".
In the process of tracking various manufacturers, Odaily discovered two risk points. One is that various manufacturers have sold mining machines before the mining has not been confirmed, and now face the risk of low output or even no output. The second is Xianhe System, a manufacturer that neither sells mining machines nor computing power to retail investors. Why is it on the list, and what medicine is in the gourd?
(1) How to solve the "fake mining machine"?
Among the many miners, 1475, The Force Zone, Interstellar Continent, and Lingdong Technology launched the first batch of mining machines (cloud computing power) as early as the first half of 2018-2019, all of which used mining algorithms that are not suitable for the current mining algorithm. Intel processor.
The M1 mining machine launched by Starland uses Intel processor (CPU) + 8GB memory, and the maximum hard disk capacity is 48TB
According to the interview report of "Miss Bishi" on Interstellar Continent, thousands of such mining machines with a price of about 5,000 yuan have been produced. 10,000 yuan mining machine.
Why can't these mining machines be used?
As mentioned above, the first step of Filecoin mining is to carry out proof of storage. This process is divided into three stages: Pre1, Pre2 and Commit.
Pre1 is to encode the data, Pre2 is to calculate the hash of the encoding result, and Commit is to generate a "zero-knowledge proof" for the encoding result for the "replication proof" to check.
Pre1 is a single-threaded work, and the calculation time is long; Pre2 is a dual-threaded, high performance requirement for the CPU, and an AMD processor that supports SHA extension is required; if an Intel processor is used, the average seal speed can only reach 1475. 1-2GB/h, while the average speed of AMD can reach 15-20GB/h, the input-output ratio between the two can be nearly ten times different.
So what should users who buy these mining machines do?
In this regard, the four miners all told Odaily that the company will take responsibility and upgrade and replace the "old mining machine" at its own expense, so that it can mine normally without requiring users to follow up on investment. As 1475 said, The Intel version of the mining machine that has been sold has been upgraded to AMD mining machine for free. Interstellar Continental said that it will recall the mining machine that has been handed over to the user for upgrading, and put the low-configuration mining machine into the cluster architecture for use as a storage machine.
The promises of the miners have yet to be fulfilled; it remains to be seen how the modified mining machines perform better than the latest generation of mining machines.
(2) Miners who "do not sell mining machines"
Among all the above miner solutions and cloud computing power, we have never compared them before, why?
Open the official website and official account of Xianhe System, and you will not see any introduction about the model of the mining machine. Nor will their salespeople be seen in the community.
But such a company that does not sell mining machines has participated in mining since the first test, and its computing power ranks high. There is no token reward for participating in the test network. It is generally believed that miners are willing to invest hundreds or thousands of machines in the test network in order to compete for rankings and promote the sales of mining machines.
Obviously, Xianhe had no such plan.
In order to solve this doubt, Odaily dialed Xianhe's official customer service hotline and was told that "Xianhe does have mining machines, but they do not sell them to retail investors, and the minimum investment threshold for partners is 3 million."
Surprised, we can understand why all of them adopt the To B sales model after carefully checking the "family property" of Xianhe.
Xianhe is one of the mining machine manufacturers that transformed from private cloud storage to Filecoin mining, similar to Chu Xun, who is now on the list.
According to the data from Qichacha, the main body of Xianhe is "Shenzhen Xianhe System Technology Co., Ltd.", which was established in 2010. Its main business includes
Personal network storage, private cloud servers, security monitoring products, etc. are recognized as "high-tech enterprises" by the state and enjoy preferential policies for tax reduction and exemption.
Xianhe began to pay attention to Filecoin in 2017 and gradually entered the mining machine market. The products sold on its current official website are all related to Filecoin mining, including blockchain distributed cloud storage servers, Filecoin network computing power overall solutions and integrated hosting.
It does not sell mining machines to retail investors, but through many "deep partners""Indirect sale. The partners that Odaily learned about include Xiandong Technology, Xindou Technology, and Zhihe Cloud that David met above.
According to the official WeChat account of Xiandong Technology, Xianhe System is its technical team, and the company has in-depth and close cooperation with Xianhe System.
Regarding the connection between Xiandong and Xianhe, we cannot see it from the shareholding structure and core members. However, public information shows that one of the four major shareholders of Xianhe, Huang Zhenming, who holds 25% of the shares and concurrently serves as the supervisor of Xianhe, is the legal person and major shareholder of Xindou Technology, another miner.
Judging from the publicity, the two parties claim to jointly build the "Xiamen Operations Center"; and Xindou is also deeply bound to Xianhe in many publicity.
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The picture comes from Zhiheyun community, "Q&A 50 of Zhiheyun"
So are these companies reliable?
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The picture comes from Zhiheyun community, "Q&A 50 of Zhiheyun"
Whether the two miners are reliable or not remains to be seen, but if there is a fraud, they will use Xianhe’s reputation to attract customers, and users will rush to the pioneer, but the problem of the mining machine has nothing to do with Xianhe. You guys consider it.
Is it possible that Xianhe System's "golden brand name" has been fraudulently used? Odaily asked Xianhe System for confirmation on these partnerships, but no reply was received as of press time.
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postscript
postscript
Not long after David finished talking about Zhiheyun, an investor in the group sent a video. The video shows that a company with "Jiaxing Zhiheyun" written on its background wall is being closed down by the police.
David was extremely annoyed, complained to us a few words, and then rushed to understand the situation.
Filecoin, perhaps because of the charm of "the top currency circle", has attracted countless investors who don't know why but are eager to try, as well as scam companies who are waiting for opportunities to harvest.
Grasping investment opportunities is what everyone wants to do, but what is more important is to identify scams and avoid pitfalls to save your life.
If Filecoin is really a "rich train", then there must be more than one opportunity to get on the train. In order to prevent you from being caught in the air, you might as well study it in the "waiting room" for a while.
Which cheating miners have you encountered? Write your name and reason in the comment area, and Odaily will help you crack down on counterfeiting.
Which manufacturers do you think have excellent strength and reliable products, but we have not mentioned, please contact audi626105 to provide data and get reports.
