Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom), published with permission.
Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)
, published with permission.
The long-awaited distributed storage project Filecoin has entered the countdown to its official launch. While launching the rewarding testnet reward program, the Filecoin team also officially released a 32-page "
Filecoin economy
"The report elaborates on the design of the token economic model.
The team stated that Filecoin provides a "blockchain-based market that is expected to revolutionize the global storage economy." The Filecoin market provides a new and secure way for everyone to buy and sell storage. It is hoped that storage users and providers will be directly linked through a decentralized and distributed storage commercialization market without access restrictions, creating the "best global storage market" and distinguishing it from existing large cloud storage providers. Its economic model hopes to motivate, restrain, support or punish different behaviors through a set of mechanisms or rules.
The 30-plus-page report explains in detail the specific incentives and economic incentives provided by the Filecoin protocol itself, and how each fee, reward, or penalty in the protocol contributes to the long-term use of the network.
At the same time as its economic model was released, Lianwen invited the Filecoin economic model design team to draw some key points for this report to help the Chinese community understand the essence of the design and better understand its economic model.
What is the core tenet of the Filecoin economic model?
According to the official statement, the mission of the Filecoin network is to provide efficient, powerful, and distributed storage for information in human society. They compare the "Filecoin economy" to an "island that exports storage-related products and services."
On this island, participants include these people: miners, storage users, developers, researchers, and token holders. These people work together to turn production raw materials, such as hard drives, computing power, manpower, etc., into reliable and useful storage. This process is like containers (sectors) full of data, exporting them to potential users with storage needs, and continuously improving the production efficiency of the economy and the attractiveness of storage.
The incentive model of the Filecoin economy makes individual behaviors compatible with network target incentives as much as possible, so that the rational behavior of participants can benefit the network, thereby benefiting all participants. For example, the economic structure makes it a rational choice to provide reliable storage services, and reliable storage services bring a reliable reputation to the network.
What is the token distribution plan?
Filecoin token distribution rules show: a total of 2 billion, called FIL_BASE, 5% is allocated to the Filecoin Foundation, 10% is used for financing, 15% is allocated to the protocol laboratory, and 70% is allocated to miners. 15% of FIL_BASE, that is, 21.4% of miner rewards, will be used as mining reserves to motivate retrieval miners and other types of miners in the future. The specific usage method will be jointly decided by the community through Filecoin Improvement Proposals (FIPs).
Why aren't Filecoin tokens simply minted linearly in time?
The way Filecoin tokens are minted changes the traditional method of minting tokens purely based on the passage of time.
The team said that if Filecoin is compared to an island economy, on this island, to trade with the residents of the island, you need to obtain the island currency, which is the FIL token. But excessive currency issuance can damage the economy, so the minting of network tokens needs to be closely linked to the utility of the network. Therefore, the Filecoin network introduced the concept of "block reward benchmark casting" to estimate network utility. The main purpose of this method is to make the speed of token minting positively correlated with the growth rate of network utility, which is more in line with economic laws and more sustainable.
Many cryptoeconomic models are simply exponential decay, which encourages short-term behavior during network launch. For example, it will prompt storage miners to over-invest in hardware in order to package storage for mining as soon as possible. It will be profitable to exit the network after consuming these early block rewards, but doing so will result in loss of user data and inability to access long-term storage.
And miners have no motivation to improve the network, entering a vicious circle. In addition, it is also possible that most of the network subsidy is paid purely based on time rather than based on the actual amount of storage provided to the network.
In order to encourage the consistency of storage landing and long-term storage investment rather than just fast encapsulation, Filecoin introduced the "block reward benchmark casting" method, which replaces the traditional method of casting tokens purely based on the passage of time, but with the The increase in the total storage computing power on the network increases the block reward. In this way, both the structure of the original exponential decay model can be preserved and it can be improved during the initial period of network startup. Once the network reaches baseline, the same cumulative block reward is issued as in a simple exponential decay model, but a portion of the block reward is delayed if the network does not reach a pre-established threshold.
Specifically, its economic model introduces a "hybrid exponential casting mechanism", that is, part of the rewards come from simple exponential decay "simple casting", and the other part comes from the "baseline casting" of the network baseline. The total reward in each period will be two the sum of rewards.
Among them, simple minting additionally incentivizes early miners and provides anti-fragility when the network is impacted; benchmark minting mints more tokens when the network creates more value. As the network can unlock greater potential, the protocol mints more tokens to facilitate more transactions.
According to the design of the Filecoin economic model, the "simple casting mechanism" allocates 30% of the storage mining quota, and the "base casting" allocates the remaining 70%. 30% simple minting can provide reaction force and anti-fragility when the network is impacted. Baseline capacity can start with a small percentage of global storage today, then grow rapidly and reach a higher but still reasonable proportion of global storage in the future. Initially, the network baseline will start at 1EiB (a figure that is less than 0.01% of today's global storage capacity) and grow at a rate of 200% per year (higher than the 40% annual growth rate of world storage capacity). When the storage provided by the network is approximately 1-10% of global storage, the community can collectively decide to slow down the growth rate.
Other points of interest
The Filecion economic model design team also outlined the following key points to Lianwen, which will be the core content of a better understanding of the Filecoin economic model:
Filecoin innovatively allows storage miners to promise capacity to the network when there is no storage demand, prove its supply and its operation and maintenance capabilities for storage, and obtain storage orders when there is storage demand, upgrade sectors, and obtain additional transaction income .
The Filecoin network introduces the concept of verified users, adding a layer of social consensus on the basis of traditional resource-driven blockchain networks. The data of verified users can get more block reward subsidies, and the verification process is relatively simple, performed by a decentralized network of validators. As long as the verification process is transparent and auditable, this will make the Filecoin network more decentralized.
The transaction orders of verified users can enable storage miners to obtain more rewards, which also gives storage users greater bargaining power in transactions. Miners are also more motivated to improve service levels and meet the diverse needs of storage customers (geography, retrieval, redundancy, etc.). And the extra block rewards subsidize activities that make the network more useful. Storage users play a very important role in the storage service and product optimization of the entire network.
Filecoin storage miners are providers of storage services and maintainers of consensus on the chain. Like many other blockchain networks, in order to ensure storage stability and network consensus security, storage miners need to pledge a certain amount of tokens when adding sectors. On this basis, in order to minimize the burden on miners, the Filecoin network has designed three different pledge mechanisms: initial pledge, block reward lockup pledge, and storage provider transaction pledge. Storage miners can start mining with less initial staking because the penalty is paid first from the staking block reward.
The sectors added by storage miners are commitments to the network and storage users. If a sector is stored unreliably or disappears from the network before fulfilling its commitment, then the sector provides very limited value to the network. The punishment mechanism needs to be deterrent to reduce the negative impact of this behavior on the storage market and network reputation. But as long as the storage miners' storage is stable enough, the penalty mechanism will have relatively little impact on the miners' profitability.
Stored data needs to be read. The main network will also launch a complete content delivery mechanism at the same time. Data stored on the network can be retrieved and read, and an unrestricted data retrieval market has thus emerged. Although there is no reward, retrieval miners are an important part responsible for querying specific data and delivering it to users, and storage miners can also provide this service in the early stages of the network.
The Filecoin economy is constantly evolving, adapting and overcoming challenges. In the future, there are many functions that will make Filecoin economic production more efficient, such as maintenance miners, search market, lending market, proof of better performance, general smart contracts, etc. In the long run, participating in the Filecoin economy does not necessarily require subsidies and can be profitable.
New features that may be launched in the future
The Filecoin team stated that the functionality and performance of the Filecoin network will continue to evolve over time, and more features will be introduced in the future to further improve economic productivity and storage attractiveness, which may include:
Servicing Miners: Currently, if a miner terminates storing a sector, they are required to pay a sector termination fee as described above. But if there is another miner that is storing the data, there should be a role called a "maintenance miner" that retrieves the data, and builds new transactions, integrates the data into the new sector and ensures that a corresponding number of copies are stored.
Application miners: A large part of the value of storage services comes from applications, user experience improvements, and different usage scenarios developed on the service itself. Therefore, it is important for future versions of Filecoin to incentivize the development of high-quality applications that increase market utility.
