What is the difference between Filecoin and BTC and ETH?

The founder of BTC is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. After he mysteriously announced his withdrawal from the project development, no one has ever found him again. However, his departure has made BTC the most decentralized (without a founder) and most consensus-based currency in the past decade.

The founder of ETH is the young genius Vitalik Buterin. As ETH became the king of public chains, it was also because of Ethereum that Vitalik Buterin was "deified" by blockchain enthusiasts.

The founder of Filecoin is Juan Benet, who graduated from Stanford University. Before creating Filecoin, he created IPFS, which aims to build the next generation of the Internet against the HTTP protocol. Filecoin is the blockchain incentive layer created for IPFS.

The consensus mechanism of BTC is the PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism. The PoW mechanism generates blocks through a computing power competition. The advantages of PoW are that it is reliable and widely used, and it is a public chain consensus algorithm that has been fully tested in practice. However, its disadvantages are also obvious: it consumes too much extra computing power, consumes a lot of energy, and is not environmentally friendly.

ETH currently uses the "PoW+PoS" consensus mechanism and is currently developing towards pure PoS, but the progress is relatively slow. PoS consensus is the recently popular "Proof of Stake", a proof of stake mechanism that calculates the probability of a block according to the coin age. The advantage of the PoS consensus mechanism is that it does not consume a lot of energy for computing power competition, but the disadvantage is that the interest earned by depositing coins according to the coin age is not conducive to the circulation of tokens.

Filecoin's consensus mechanism is the expected consensus, and the main proof mechanism is the Proof of Space and Time (PoSt) mechanism, that is, the (storage) space and time proof. Based on the equity consensus PoS (Proof-of-Stake), Filecoin improved the consensus mechanism to PoSt to replace the proof of work PoW.

In the Filecoin system, mining is considered successful when miners complete storage and users confirm that miners have completed storage. PoSt is generated by Filecoin when verifying that miners store user data. Filecoin converts the current storage data of miners in the network relative to the storage ratio of the entire network into miner voting rights, where the probability of the network selecting a miner to create a new block is proportional to the storage they are using and the cost of the rest of the network.

Under the PoSt mechanism, miners invest in storage rather than computing power to parallelize mining calculations. Miners provide storage and reuse computing to prove that data is stored to participate in consensus. Proof of Storage (PoSt) is used to generate consensus.

Simply put, mining based on the PoSt mechanism is mining that requires a large amount of storage space (hard disk) and bandwidth resources.

The essence of BTC/ETH mining machines is data computing equipment. Whether it is the early CPU mining, GPU mining, or the later FPGA mining, ASIC mining, and large-scale cluster mining, the essence is to focus on improving the data computing capabilities of mining equipment.

The essence of IPFS mining machine is data storage device.

The difference in the nature of mining machines makes the configuration characteristics of storage mining machines very different from those of BTC/ETH mining machines. Storage mining machines mainly used for data storage do not require too high computing power, that is, the CPU performance does not require too high, and the memory capacity is suitable, but a large storage space is required, that is, the hard disk density per unit space must be large, and as many hard disks as possible should be equipped. At the same time, the I/O performance of data storage must be high, and there must be as high a bandwidth channel as possible. Due to the special requirements of data storage, the entire mining machine must be stable, safe, and not easily damaged.

Ethereum provides smart contracts, which expands the application scope of blockchain. Filecoin's large file storage expands the foundation for blockchain development, especially the support for Dapp. Filecoin will make more great contributions in the future.

Remember the guy who bought pizza with 10,000 bitcoins? He was one of the first miners to participate in BTC mining. In the early days of BTC mining, 6,000 to 7,000 bitcoins could be mined every day using a home computer. As the prices of BTC and ETH have risen, the prices of BTC and ETH mining machines have also skyrocketed. Coupled with the continuous halving of BTC, fewer and fewer coins can be mined now. The bonus period of BTC and ETH has passed.

It has been exactly three months since the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. Although the price of the currency has increased a lot, looking at the entire Filecoin and IPFS ecosystem, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The carnival of Filecoin miners has just begun!