Is Crust's miner income better than Filecoin?

Introduction: The emergence of Filecoin has made it possible to effectively utilize storage devices and networks and reduce the storage and transmission costs of data. At the same time, more and more distributed storage projects have gradually appeared in front of the public, among which the "Filecoin" of the Polkadot ecosystem - Crust is worth mentioning.

This article briefly analyzes the mining machines and miners of Filecoin and Crust , hoping to be helpful to the novice miners who are just entering the industry.

IPFS is the Interplanetary File System distributed storage system. It is a global, peer-to-peer new hypermedia transmission protocol that supports the creation of fully distributed applications. Its purpose is to supplement (or even replace) the current Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Although IPFS has the advantages of faster, more secure, more open, and lower cost, it requires a huge number of machines to store data in order to maintain the stability of the network. Therefore, an incentive system called Filecoin was created. Filecoin is based on the underlying protocol of IPFS, which is equivalent to Filecoin being the incentive layer of IPFS. If you use your own machine as a node and contribute your bandwidth and hard disk storage, you can get token rewards (FIL).

In common blockchain protocols, miners are participants on the network who provide services to advance the blockchain and maintain its validity, and are compensated in local crypto assets. However, mining in Filecoin works very differently - miners do not provide computing power, but storage power to handle clients who want to store data.

If we want to invest in Filecoin, how should we choose miners? Which ones are more reliable? After a series of investigations, we conducted some parameter analysis on the miners currently active in the market.

Filecoin mining machine parameter comparison, data source: Daliang Think Tank

The above is a series of survey data on the basic parameters of miners. It can be seen that both Spacetime Cloud and Athena Mine have a certain redundancy ratio, and in comparison, the effective computing power of Athena Mine is higher and the service fee is relatively appropriate.

However, it is not feasible to select miners based on these parameters, so in addition to these basic parameters, we also intercepted data from the official website to conduct a comprehensive analysis. (The following interception time is 11:00 am on March 24, 2021)

1. Effective computing power analysis

Mining rankings (effective computing power/occupancy), data source: https://filfox.info/zh

Effective computing power distribution, data source: https://filfox.info/zh

Effective computing power is a basic data in Filecoin mining. When judging a mining farm or mining pool, the first thing to look at is the ranking of effective computing power. It can be seen that Spacetime Cloud Miner ranks first, followed by Athena Mine and Interstellar Continent.

Although effective computing power is important, it does not represent everything. Sometimes, even if the effective computing power is strong, the output of FIL may not be high. Therefore, in addition to looking at the effective computing power ranking, we also need to analyze the ranking of the number of blocks produced and the computing power increase.

2. Number of blocks

Mining ranking (number of blocks), data source: https://filfox.info/zh

As can be seen from the above figure, the number of blocks produced by Spacetime Cloud ranks first, followed by Athena Mine and Interstellar Continent.

3. Increase in computing power

Mining rankings (computing power growth rate), data source: https://filfox.info/zh

It can be seen that Athena Mine performs well in this module, and Spacetime Cloud is still on the list. Overall, Spacetime Cloud and Athena Mine have shown good results both in terms of basic parameters and official test data.

Crust provides a decentralized storage network for the Web3 ecosystem, supports multiple storage layer protocols including IPFS, and provides interfaces for the application layer. Its technology stack can also support a decentralized computing layer, aiming to build a distributed cloud ecosystem that values ​​data privacy and ownership.

1. The difference between Crust and Filecoin

Although Crust and Filecoin are both distributed storage networks based on the IPFS protocol, Filecoin is an independent public chain. Crust belongs to the Polkadot parallel chain, relying on the underlying security and cross-chain protocol of Polkadot to build a distributed storage ecosystem. However, since they are both decentralized storage projects, many people often compare the two.

There are two main differences between Crust and Filecoin:

(1) Differences in Storage Proof Algorithms

There is a core problem in the decentralized storage network: the storage node needs to prove to the chain which files it has correctly stored. Filecoin's core proof mechanism is based on a large number of complex cryptographic calculations, including proof of replication and proof of space-time. However, Crust's core proof mechanism is implemented through local storage verification based on TEE.

(2) Chain Differences

Filecoin's chain is developed by itself, and Crust is developed based on the Substrate framework. The consensus algorithm, off-chain worker, and upgrade mechanism are all consistent with the Polkadot ecosystem. Therefore, Crust's chain maturity is relatively high.

2. Advantages of Crust

Compared with Filecoin, Crust's main advantages are reflected in the following three aspects.

(1) Crust’s cost is lower than Filecoin

Filecoin's complex proof mechanism makes them have high requirements for mining machine configuration and requires a lot of computing power. Crust's TEE-based technical solution is more economical and does not require high mining machine configuration. At the same time, nodes do not need to buy tokens in advance for "pre-mortgage" when mining on the Crust network.

(2) Crust’s storage proof and chain maturity are higher than Filecoin

Filecoin's proof algorithm is developed by itself, and there is no stable public version that can be finalized yet, so the mining hardware is not very certain and may change in the future. However, the TEE technology that Crust is based on is a mature industrial-grade module, and the TEE ecological technology will continue to develop more powerful functions.

(3) Compared with Filecoin, Crust has relatively good implementation

Filecoin and Crust both require files to be encapsulated before they can be stored correctly. However, due to algorithm limitations, Filecoin takes nearly two hours to encapsulate a 32G file, while Crust only takes 60 seconds to encapsulate each 32G file based on TEE's built-in re-encryption technology.

In addition, Crust’s on-chain governance and non-forking upgrade mechanism based on Substrate enable Crust to smoothly upgrade the protocol without forking. This will be very friendly for future Crust-based applications.

3. Selection of Crust Miner

Unlike Filecoin, Crust has just entered the market and the market maturity of mining machines is not very high. It is inevitable that miners will fall into the dilemma of choice. Therefore, we conducted a series of surveys on several well-known Crust miners and calculated official data.

Crust mining machine parameter comparison, data source: Daliang Think Tank, Crust official website

From the basic parameters, the processors used by 168node, Yaochi Miner and Miner 1 are all home office-grade processors, while NashCloud uses server-grade processors. From this aspect, NashCloud has an advantage in the stability of mining machines.

Analysis of the input-output ratio of Crust mining machines, data source: DaLing Think Tank

For miners, the input-output ratio is of utmost importance. Through the survey data, we briefly calculated the input-output ratio of the four major mining companies. It can be seen that the payback period and revenue of 168node and NashCloud are relatively considerable.

Crust's top 25 single ton production data, data source: DaLing Think Tank

The above is the single TB output calculated by official data. The single TB output of NashCloud node is about 0.0184, the single TB output of 168node node is about 0.0173, and the single TB output of Yaochi node is about 0.0142.

1. Distributed storage track

Filecoin has received widespread attention from the cryptocurrency and mining circles since its debut. Many mainstream institutions have deployed distributed storage. In addition, distributed storage projects only need to control the entry and exit of data, and supervision is relatively easy. Therefore, the distributed storage market is hot, and the funds flowing into this track are gradually increasing. Distributed storage has become one of the few hot concepts in the industry.

2. Storage track of Polkadot ecosystem

Today, the heat of the distributed storage market has not been fully released. The point-to-point transmission mechanism of distributed storage combined with token incentives is full of imagination in terms of data ownership, privacy protection, etc., which brings new possibilities to the current cloud storage and cloud computing market.

For every ecosystem, storage is an essential infrastructure, so IPFS is not the only one that is planning a distributed storage project. Polkadot, the "king of cross-chain", has also planned the first distributed storage project in its ecosystem - Crust.

3. Comparison of Filecoin and Crust Token Economy

(1) Consensus Mechanism

Filecoin's consensus mechanism is an effective storage consensus. Unlike the POW consensus mechanism, where miners' computing power comes from their computing power, Filecoin miners also need computing power to guarantee storage, but their computing power comes from the size of their sealed effective data storage.

Crust's consensus is the GPoS mechanism, which is essentially based on PoS and evolved from Polkadot's NPoS mechanism, combining the resource fairness of PoW and the high performance of the PoS chain. TEE components are used to provide capacity proof and validity proof.

(2) Allocation mechanism

The upper limit of Filecoin minting is 2 billion, of which 70% will be allocated to miners for maintaining data storage, maintaining blockchain, distributing data, running contracts, etc.

The number of tokens generated when the Crust mainnet is launched is: 20 million CRU. After the mainnet is launched, 5 million CRU will be generated in the first year to reward participating miners. From the second year onwards, the total amount issued each year will be 88% of the previous year, and it will not decrease until the inflation rate of the entire network reaches 2.8%.

As a pioneer, Filecoin has a very important significance and position in the distributed storage track. Crust also stands on the shoulders of giants and gives us unexpected surprises again and again. A rising star has obviously emitted its own brilliant light. The blueprint has been drawn, and it is time to set sail. I believe that more and more "Crust" will appear in the future storage track, and together create a beautiful blueprint for distributed storage.

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This article is reproduced from DaLing Think Tank