The space test rewards were launched on time at 6:00 am on August 25th (Tuesday), Beijing time. For miners who have become accustomed to the "Ace Pigeon" project, this competition has accelerated mining cluster mining at home and abroad The progress of the "arms race" has once again aroused the enthusiasm of domestic users who invest in Filecoin mining machines.

Is the space test just a reward competition for computing power ranking?

At 6:00 a.m. on August 25th, Beijing time, Filecoin’s three-week global space race to share 4.1 million FIL started. This big miner test competition is not only the implementation of the Filecoin testnet incentive plan, but also the practice of stress testing the network. It is an event that global miner nodes and mining machine investors are most concerned about recently.

The core of this space test is the network stress test before the mainnet goes online. During the period, the reward reference value is the ranking of the effective computing power of the miner nodes and the success rate of order transactions (including storage and retrieval). The order success rate must reach more than 80% , this is not just a test that rewards those rankings that accumulate effective storage computing power by accumulating hardware.

The space test is a "full simulation test" before the mainnet goes live. The key codes of the mainnet will be optimized according to the codes of this space race. The block generation income of this test is consistent with that of the mainnet.

For global miners, they can simulate and experience the mainnet launch situation in advance, in case of temporary problems with their own clusters or operation and maintenance methods, they can debug in advance and take corresponding countermeasures. Secondly, this test uses FIL to encourage globalization of effective storage and computing power layout to avoid centralized computing power monopoly. Miners fully demonstrated their technical strength in this test. This test has important reference significance for miners’ mining income after the mainnet goes online. After the three-week test is over, the miner market may face a reshuffle.

Dazzling "firsts" in space tests

At 9:00 a.m. on August 25th, Beijing time, IPFSBase and Cointelegraph Chinese jointly hosted the event to witness the birth of the first block of the space race. During the event, we witnessed that the first node in the entire network to complete the 32G sector packaging was t01101. Being the first to complete the package among nearly 200 miner nodes is not only good luck, but also a reflection of the technical strength of the team.

Subsequently, Leiying mining machine, dataline & Diancun also successfully completed the sector packaging and accumulated corresponding storage computing power. Among them, Diancun Technology t01155 is the first miner to seal up 1T effective storage computing power in the whole network, and it is also the first unofficial miner node The node that produced the block did not last long. Not long after winning the first block, Diancun Technology suffered a large number of DDOS attacks from unknown sources, and its effective computing power was also heavily deducted.

In addition to point deposits, miners such as Space-Time Cloud and Force Zone have also announced that they have suffered DDOS attacks of varying degrees. Many people are speculating whether the attack was initiated by Song Jiang in Slack, but Song Jiang denied the attack in a Medium post , and declared that the current attack is of little significance, and that the attack before the end of the space test will break the order success rate of major miners below 80%, which is what it previously claimed"small goal"。

From the perspective of project development, this DDOS attack has made big miners and users and investors aware of the importance of operation and maintenance security. Each miner node provides storage and retrieval services for the entire network, and the network will reward the corresponding FIL of the node. There is no doubt that miner nodes with FIL are naturally the targets that hackers want to attack, so the strength of security operation and maintenance should also be included in the selection of high-quality One of the conditions of miners.

In the picture above, The Force Zone advertised that its single node T02438 was the first in the entire network for single T revenue on August 26, but it was limited to the results of that day. The rankings of various miners changed drastically the next day. There is a kind of rush that you sing and I come on stage.

Scrambled flowers are becoming more and more charming. The promotion similar to No. 1 occurred in the marketing groups of the communities of major miners. IPFSBase believes that the "No. 1" claimed by major miners was indeed No. 1 at that stage, but the Probability only exists at this time node at that time, and the ranking changes very quickly after that. Probably after the fourth day of the space test, the effective computing power rankings tended to be relatively stable.

The picture above is the ranking of miners’ effective storage computing power nodes on Filfox as of the time of publication. It can be seen that the effective computing power of a single node of Zhiheyun has reached 6.26PiB. Having won the top spot of a single node, they can theoretically announce various rankings as "No. 1". The pomegranate mining machine has a total of 16 miner nodes. According to the statistics of the total computing power, the pomegranate node is the first in total computing power. But what investors need to pay attention to is whether this No. 1 is sustainable, what is the inner meaning of this No. 1, and which No. 1 is the most worthy of attention for investment?

The reason why many Filecoin investors buy mining machines is that they are attracted by the small investment and high returns advertised by marketers. According to IPFSBase, many investors are still looking forward to paying back their capital within two months after the mainnet goes live. Little do they know that the government has revised the economic model, the mined coins need to be locked for 20 days first, and then released linearly within the next 180 days, so the expectation of quickly recovering the cost by selling the mined tokens in a short period of time no longer exists. It is the right solution to prevent yourself from falling into an infinite cycle of stepping on pits, and to improve your awareness of projects and industry trends.

A space test monopolized by Asian computing power?

A user named Song Jiang on Slack before strongly condemned the Filecoin project as more and more like a centralized storage. The data obtained from spacerace.filecoin shows that the top 5 top miners have accounted for nearly 40% of the effective computing power of the entire network. Asian miners It has already occupied more than 95% of the computing power of the entire network. It is no exaggeration to say that the largest suppliers of Filecoin storage services are in Asia.

The over-centralization of effective storage computing power is obviously contrary to the original intention of the Filecoin project party, but currently the most enthusiastic users of Filecoin are in Asia. In order to distribute the storage computing power globally, the official has deliberately set up the dispatching robot in Europe, which has caused many Asian The inability of miners to complete orders at the early stage of the Calibration test led to repeated delays in the space test.

According to conventional understanding, the more decentralized, the better the network security, and the more stable the network operation will be. However, for the Filecoin project, it seems that it cannot be well compatible with decentralization and network stability. Small stand-alone miners cannot guarantee 24-hour uninterrupted online. The pledge penalty mechanism plays an important role in ensuring the stability and security of the network, but for It is fatal to small miners.

At present, the software technology strength and cooperative operation and maintenance team strength of leading miners are unmatched by small miners. However, according to the speculation of senior experts in the industry, after the mainnet is launched, mining technology will no longer be the entry threshold for the track. At that time, the best mining algorithm was open source, and the main difference between miners was the size of the volume and the stability of operation and maintenance. Only then can we discuss the vision of distributed storage to be more grounded.