Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews
Text | Edited by Nancy | Produced by Bi Tongtong | PANews
Filecoin has "released pigeons" again.
"Filecoin is an expert in expectation management, and he keeps raising everyone's expectations of him." Some investors joked in the community. But for those who are still waiting to enter the market, it will increase the time for researching mining machines and computing power service providers to make decisions. "Everyone is afraid of missing the first wealth train after the mainnet goes live."
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Big guys shout orders online, big and small miners come together
With the blessing of IPFS, Filecoin has jumped to become the summer "top stream" in the currency circle this year. Especially under the fancy "orders" of Du Jun, Bao Erye, Wang Feng and other bigwigs, the FOMO sentiment further fermented, and a large amount of capital poured into the Filecoin track.
The main network has not yet been launched, but the market has set off a crazy "gold rush". Mining machines have been sold round after round, and futures have been fired again and again in the secondary market. The increase during the year was as high as 407.81%. The industry can be described as a busy scene.
Half flame, half sea water. In stark contrast to the heat of domestic discussions is the deserted scene overseas. When it remains high, overseas is deserted. Whether it is social media attention or Google search volume, China is far higher than other countries. Even judging from the participating nodes of the second-stage testnet, nearly 80% of the miners are located in China.
At the same time, Fenbushi Capital, Du Jun, Bao Erye, and Wang Feng, the four "calling" kings, have become the main promoters of the domestic Filecoin fire. In addition to shouting orders online, its media is also promoting Filecoin. For example, Fenbushi Capital, which claims to focus on IPFS ecology this year, is an early investor in Filecoin, and they also invested in mining solution provider 1475 this year. The Mars Cloud Mine under Wang Feng sold the Filecoin computing power 1000T that was originally planned to be sold for 10 days, but it was sold out in 12 hours, and the scene was very hot. In addition, the Mining Summit held in Chengdu in May this year allowed Filecoin to successfully attract many Bitcoin miners.
At present, there are two main ways for investors to participate in Filecoin: mining and purchasing exchange futures. Among them, the mining machine is the most direct way for ordinary investors to participate, and it is also a way full of temptations.
"Today, a customer directly bought a mining machine worth 6 million US dollars." The sales director of a certain Filecoin mining pool told PANews that the market lacks good investment targets this year, and hot money is pouring into Filecoin. Large households poured in a lot of money, and small households were not stingy. PANews added a few WeChats for mining machine sales, and they all posted orders on WeChat. 10,000, 20,000... small miners entered the market one after another.
As far as mining is concerned, the complexity of Filecoin is much higher than that of Bitcoin. "The design of Filecoin is very unfriendly to ordinary people participating in mining. Electricity, network, operation and maintenance, etc. are all obstacles to mining at home, and it is difficult to solve. The mechanism design of Filecoin requires miners participating in mining to keep the stored data available online at any time. , otherwise, once it is spot-checked but fails to provide the corresponding data, it will be punished by the system. Whether it is a temporary power outage of the mining machine, a poor network, or other software and hardware problems, the result is the same. Therefore, Filecoin mining machine manufacturers except In addition to software and hardware optimization, IDC computer room, hosting, and operation and maintenance services are already standard configurations.” “Coin Circle Li Bai”, the core developer of Pomegranate Pool, told PANews.
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Mining or digging? What is the correct posture
The current mining machine market is like a black box, hiding many secrets and darkness. Since Filecoin has not announced its specific algorithm before, the threshold for imitating IPFS mining machines is extremely low, and various scams in the name of pre-sale, pre-mining, and double-mining continue one after another.
Among them, double mining is one of the classic routines of Filecoin mining machine fraud. In 2018, the snail interstellar mining machine claimed to be able to double-dig CAI and Filecoin, attracting 2 billion gold in 5 months, but in the end the machine became scrap iron, and the number of victims was as high as 7,000.
In addition to all kinds of scams, the various Filecoin mining machines on the market are constantly trampled on. The mining capacity of many physical mining machines is insufficient, and some mining machines are even shoddy and cannot dig out tokens at all. Even if it is a suitable mining machine, problems such as power outages, network failures, and software iterations are invisible thresholds for ordinary investors. In order to ensure that storage nodes provide users with high-quality services, the reward and punishment mechanism mentioned above is also a threshold. In fact, it is difficult for most ordinary investors to guarantee the long-term stability of their storage devices. The reason is that accidents such as network outages and power outages are completely out of control, and equipment failures and network changes have certain technical requirements for investors. In addition, a single mining machine costing 100,000 to 200,000 yuan is also a lot of pressure on investors, not to mention the return on hardware investment and FIL's mortgage investment is also unknown.
There was deep water with demand before, and there was a surge in technology later, and the "big fish and small fish" began to move around. "Joint mining lowers the threshold of participation, and everyone can mine." Compared with the high threshold and long work of professional mining, many people take a fancy to the low entry threshold, flexibility and convenience of cloud computing power, especially the small amount of funds , Investors with low risk appetite. In their view, in addition to not having to worry about power outages and hardware failures, they also don’t have to bear the risks of performance degradation of mining machines due to changes in Filecoin parameters before the mainnet goes live. As a result, cloud computing power mining has rapidly become popular, and various product marketing tricks are full of tricks, but is it really reliable?
According to PANews survey, cloud computing power service providers get about 700 yuan per T from mining pools, and sell them to users at around 1200-1500 yuan. Unlike buying mining machines, most cloud computing power products It is a one-year period and needs to be renewed after expiration, and investors do not own the ownership of the mining machine. The transparency of cloud computing power products deserves attention.
In this regard, "Currency Circle Li Bai" believes that "cloud computing power is an alternative to investing in a complete machine, and the threshold for participation is low, but the corresponding price is higher cost. In fact, the business model of cloud computing power will inevitably lead to higher unit costs than the first-line Miners, in this case, participants are required to have their own estimates and judgments on the quality of the project and the competition after it goes online. In addition, because the calculation method of Filecoin’s income is different from that of common mining, you can pay more attention to the income when investing If ordinary people do not have the corresponding resources, it is best to leave the professional work to professional people, do their own research, invest in mining machines and entrust them to reliable mining pools or buy cloud computing power It may be more reliable than mining by yourself.”
At the same time, "Currency Circle Li Bai" also reminded that Filecoin officials have repeatedly reminded the community to purchase hardware carefully before the mainnet parameter design is determined. Although it may only be one or two months away from the mainnet launch, and the hardware configuration is basically finalized, you still need to check the manufacturer's technical strength and delivery capabilities when purchasing related products, and don't trust all kinds of high efficiency and high return rates that come out of thin air. . The hardware of Filecoin is relatively transparent. Refer to the official test configuration, and the efficiency of software optimization can be used as a reference through the storage capacity accumulation and growth rate of the test network.
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The increase of more than 400% in three months, is FIL futures reliable?
Marx's "Das Kapital" wrote that once there is an appropriate profit, capital will become daring. If there is 10% profit, it is guaranteed to be used everywhere; if there is 20% profit, it will be active; if there is 50% profit, it will take risks; for 100% profit, it will dare to trample on all human laws; It dares to commit any crime without 1% of the profit, even risking hanging its head.
After three years of technical iteration, everyone is looking forward to this super project. For many investors who want to buy Filecoin but don't want to snap up it at a high price after the mainnet goes live, FIL futures are a good choice. According to Feixiaohao's research, the current price of FIL futures is US$18.56, an increase of 407.81% in the past three months, while the increase of Bitcoin in three months is only 29.11%.
With high returns, FIL futures naturally ignited the attention and pursuit of it from the outside world, and it also caused many exchanges to get together and go online. Feixiaohao data shows that dozens of exchanges have opened FIL futures on the market, such as Gate.io, BiKi, etc.
So, what is going on with FIL futures? After investors successfully participate in Filecoin crowdfunding on CoinList, they will receive a SAFT agreement, which will indicate the amount invested by the investor, the number and price of tokens purchased, the time and rules for the release of Filecoin, such as The refund mechanism for projects that cannot be launched normally, etc. It can be simply understood that this is a commitment protected by law. Then, some investors trade this agreement on the exchange in the form of futures.
According to PANews, there are currently three main types of futures on the exchange. One is that the exchange itself has participated in ICO, and the futures are the amount in its own hands; the second is the amount that traders repurchase from other ICO investors; The third type is completely a blank check. After Filecoin is launched and excavated, it will directly purchase tokens from the mining pool.
This involves two issues, redemption risk and time risk. First of all, according to the agreement, if Filecoin cannot be successfully launched before 2022, investors can get a refund from the project party. Even if the other party comes up with a SAFT agreement, investors have to bear a certain amount of time risk. Secondly, if the other party fails to provide the SAFT agreement, or is unwilling to honor the transferred futures, then the investor's money will be wasted. "Currency Circle Li Bai" also emphasized in the interview that FIL futures have not received official support and are products launched by the exchange itself.
In fact, Filecoin officials have stated that Filecoin tokens will only be valid after the mainnet is launched, and any exchange that now lists Filecoin tokens or IPFS tokens may be fraudulent. At the same time, they strongly recommend staying away from any exchanges or entities that claim to buy, sell or trade Filecoin or IPFS SAFTS, tokens or derivatives.
It can neither be officially recognized nor can it be extracted to the personal wallet address. The water of FIL futures is really deep.
However, after the Filecoin mainnet went live, token pressure and circulation also brought a series of uncertainties to it. "Because Filecoin's economic model cannot be implemented, it does bring a lot of uncertainty, because we don't know how it will be mortgaged, what coefficient will be used, and we can't even make a model. At present The entire token logic of Filecoin is based on the financial model. Through the issuance of tokens, miners sell the coins and then invest in the network. Miners definitely hope that the price of the currency will be high. Only when the price is pushed up will people enter the market, and the mining machines will be fine. Only by selling them can they add value and the technology can continue to develop, so miners will pledge tokens.” Zhang Rihe, CEO of Xianhe System, told PANews.
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Will supervision become a "blocker"? Investors need to do what they can
As a decentralized storage provider, Filecoin can split files into many copies and store them anonymously on different computers around the world, no longer having to trust a company's database. It is also the story of "distributed storage" and "no one can delete" that even Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator and other eight top global venture capitals have become its Bole.
But at the same time, it also brings regulatory concerns. Will IPFS/Filecoin be regulated because of data anonymity and data sensitivity? Not long ago, some netizens asked Filecoin officials, "How does the Filecoin network handle content deletion requests? (such as child pornography) If I am a storage provider, what is my responsibility here?"
The official reply states that Filecoin is a protocol that helps coordinate file storage among a decentralized network of storage providers and clients. The network cannot delete files on participants' computers. However, they are developing a powerful set of tools to help users control the type of data they are willing to store and serve from their machines.
In this regard, Joss believes that behind this problem is a human problem. We often hear a saying that "technology is not guilty". Regarding the supervision of sensitive data, we can start from the service layer, from the uploaded entrance and the disseminated exit.
"Currency circle Li Bai" said that supervision is an unavoidable topic in the blockchain, and the field of decentralized storage has its own unique challenges. At present, due to the immaturity of this part of the technology and the small scope of application, it has not been supervised for the time being, but decentralization does not mean ignoring morality and law. For Filecoin, although "no one can delete", the storage and retrieval market, as the entrance and exit of storage, is more likely to be regulated. Now many teams are developing technologies that do not disclose user privacy and can meet regulatory requirements. I believe that there will eventually be technical solutions to these problems.
In addition to regulatory issues, the high valuation and high popularity of Filecoin also makes many people think that it will become the biggest bubble of the year. In fact, Filecoin has undergone several modifications and compromises from the incomplete white paper when it was released to the development network and then to the test network. At present, Filecoin is still in its infancy, and everyone is staking the land, but the enthusiasm of the market has already surpassed the progress of the project development.
"After two years of delay, the launch of Filecoin caught up with a 'vacant period' when there were not many hot spots in the industry, which promoted its popularity, but this enthusiasm was brought by practitioners to a certain extent. Various products on the market need to have their own identification capabilities. Decentralized storage is an indispensable part of Web3 and various decentralized applications. In the long run, it has its unique market demand and value, but short-term return on investment is affected by Market fluctuations have a greater impact, and investors need to act according to their own risk tolerance." "Currency circle Li Bai" said.
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Additional reading:Additional reading:
Yesterday and Today of IPFS/Filecoin
Distributed storage networks have a long history.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, published a paper "Information Management: A Proposal", proposing the idea of building a hyperlinked document system on the Internet. It is this idea that lights up the new world for us - HTTP was born and laid the foundation for the rapid development and prosperity of the Internet.
However, with the rise of various new models, the traditional HTTP protocol has been difficult to meet the needs of the growing variety of problems due to centralization of servers, high vulnerability to attacks, high data storage costs, and difficulty in large-scale data transmission and maintenance. application needs. For example, when hundreds of millions of traffic flooded in on "Double 11", we often encountered website crashes.
At this time, the distributed storage network appeared. For example, BitTorrent (Note: later acquired by TRON and renamed as BTT), Kazza, and Napster were relatively well-known distributed storage network projects at that time, and there are still hundreds of millions of active users. Among them, BitTorrent is the earliest decentralized storage project and the prototype of all decentralized storage models. Since its inception in 2001, the BitTorrent protocol has completely changed the field of content and file sharing, and defined the standard for peer-to-peer file transfers. However, due to lack of scalability, BitTorrent has gradually been marginalized.
In May 2014, Juan Benet (Juan Benet), who graduated from Stanford University, founded the Protocol Lab (Protocol Lab) and proposed the idea of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, Interplanetary File System). This newborn calf is not afraid of tigers, peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed file system, intended to replace the current Internet Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
To a certain extent, IPFS borrows from BitTorrent network features, such as punishment measures, file availability checks, etc., but IPFS is even better. "The emergence of IPFS has inherited the advantages of BT, but it has better dealt with the issue of data ownership. The pain point of security and confirmation is the revolutionary significance that IPFS, a digital technology, brings to the Internet. Combining with Filecoin, this ecology can eventually be The borders are endlessly widening," Joss told PANews.
Filecoin is an incentive layer running on the IPFS system, which is used to reward Filecoin miners for their mining actions, or to pay the fees generated by transactions in the IPFS network. Although IPFS and Filecoin are actually two different systems, they are more complementary and both are developed and maintained by Protocol Labs.
In August 2017, Filecoin, the token of IPFS's public chain, successfully raised more than 250 million US dollars in financing through crowdfunding. The token sale this time is only 10%, which means that the market value of IPFS has reached 2.5 billion US dollars before it is officially launched. According to its white paper, the total amount of Filecoin is 2 billion, of which 70% is reserved for miners to mine, which means that miners can mine 1.4 billion pieces, which is equivalent to 17.22 billion US dollars at the current price of 12.3 US dollars per coin.
However, the mainnet of this much-anticipated project has been delayed repeatedly, consuming the patience and confidence of many community enthusiasts and investors. According to the project roadmap of IPFS, its main network should be launched in 2018, but after the official postponement to June 2019, the ticket was skipped again. At present, Filecoin has launched the second phase of the test network and released a reward plan. Miners around the world can compete to obtain global and regional rewards totaling 4 million Filecoin tokens.
