Filecoin Miner Reputation System

A reliable reputation system is essential for the smooth operation of the Filecoin ecosystem. Storage users need to find the miners that best suit their needs from among many storage miners. The reputation system exists to help users find suitable storage miners.

One challenge in building a reputation system is that there is a lot of relevant data, and any activity of Filecoin miners may be related to reputation. The system's goal is to mine this data and find the part that best reflects the miner's reliability and performance as the basis for reputation scoring. Other data can only be used to distinguish different miners, but has little to do with the miner's reputation.

The Filrep.io reputation system consists of two main complementary components:

1. Reputation score, which records the reliability of the miner conducting the transaction (reliability refers to the miner's ability to successfully accept and complete storage and retrieval transactions).

2. Some performance indicators are used to evaluate whether miners can meet the user's storage requirements, such as price, location, and available space. These indicators are of concern to storage users.

In the first version of Filrep.io, reputation scores are only related to the reliability of stored transactions. Retrieving transaction-related information will be added in subsequent versions of the system.

All data of Filrep.io is available through public APIs and dashboards. The system design takes into account all ecological participants: developers can use the data of public APIs to improve the miner selection options among their storage users; miners can use the dashboard to view and compare their own performance with other miners to understand how to improve services; storage users can use the dashboard to select the miners that best meet their needs.

How is the reputation score calculated?

The difficulty in selecting the indicators and formulas that make up the reputation score lies in avoiding overly simple scoring that applies to all scenarios while not including too many indicators in the scoring considerations.

Simply put, the Filrep.io development team decided to focus only on indicators that reflect whether miners serve users well. Another difficulty is how to deal with the impact of time on miners' reputation. Should past and recent behaviors have the same weight? The forgiveness mechanism is the core mechanism for humans to let go of bad things that happened in the past. So the reputation score also includes the forgiveness mechanism. As time goes by, past mistakes will become less and less important.

Guiding principles throughout the design process:

The score should reflect the miner’s behavior throughout the entire transaction process: from preparing to accept the transaction, to responding to the price request and accepting and completing the transaction.

The score should reflect the quality of the miner's service. Quantity is also important, and the system provides metrics to represent quantity: number of transactions, total data stored, etc. However, the score will not discriminate against new miners who have just joined the protocol, simply because they have fewer transactions than older miners with many transactions. As long as new miners are truly providing quality service to the community, they should be able to get full marks even if they have fewer transactions.

The scoring formula should take into account the effect of the passage of time, giving higher weight to miners' most recent actions.

In order to cover the different aspects that influence the successful execution of a storage transaction, Filrep.io's score is also divided into several parts.

The maximum score a miner can get is 100 points.

The score is based on three groups of indicators, each with a different weight in the overall score.

Proof of commitment sector indicator: 30% weight. Before the sector stores the transaction, miners can submit proof to commit the sector's storage space and receive rewards. In order to meet storage needs, it is important to prevent failures as much as possible.

Online access: 30% weight. Asking miners for FIL prices is the first step in initiating a storage transaction. If the price request fails, the storage process will not be able to continue and the miner will be punished. The reputation system will periodically ask miners. When scoring, we will consider the distribution of request success/failure over a period of time.

Transaction indicator: 40% weight. The third component of the score reflects the success rate of the miner in completing storage transactions. Completing storage transactions is the main task of miners, and this part has the highest weight in the total score.

Reputation Score V2 Roadmap

The ultimate goal of Filrep.io is to provide a reliable, fair, and complete reputation system for the Filecoin community. Our development team is committed to continuously improving the tool by focusing on protocol improvements and community feedback.

In the coming months, we will be implementing a number of new features and improvements. Here are some of the plans:

Added search indicators: time to get the first byte, data download speed.

Allow miners to create accounts and gain more functional permissions:

Miners are certified and named (similar to the "space race").

Miners running group operations transfer the reputation from the miner machine to the company/institution.

Allow miners to set maintenance time windows (during the maintenance time window, the query robot will not send requests to the miner so that the reputation is not affected).

Provides logs to increase system transparency.

Allow miners to set up a company homepage and provide contact information.