This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone On March 4th, Beijing time, the upgrade of Filecoin spec-actor v3 took effect, accompanied by the mandatory full network upgrade of Lotus v1.5.0 and its accompanying FIP-10. The FIP-10 proposal is mainly for optimizing the gas fee of SubmitWindowedPoSt proof. There are two initial solutions: providing fast channels or batch verification, and finally confirming fast channels. FIP-10 uses fast channels to improve the utilization of the chain, reduce all on-chain proof steps of SubmitWindowedPoSt proof, and supervise space-time proof through incentives and penalties. Because all miners in the network have not yet updated Lotus v1.5.0, it is difficult to actually predict the actual scenario. However, preliminary observations show that SubmitWindowedPoSt currently consumes no more than 1,000 FIL per day and has more than 30,000 messages (accounting for about 3% of the total network information). Intuitively, the impact of reducing gas fees on the entire network may not be significant. The real situation needs to be further combined with the actual situation of the entire network. However, according to market demand, even if the Gas Fee is lowered, new computing power will grow every day, which may quickly cover this amount of information. In general, the above is only a preliminary analysis, and the specific results need to wait until the entire network is updated before a conclusion can be drawn. This time, let’s review the current consumption of Gas fees and deeply interpret the current status of Gas. 1. Network-wide Gas Fee Penalty: The trial-and-error cost of Filecoin network iteration may be further expanded in the future According to statistics on February 8, the total network size was 2.377EiB at that time. Among the nearly 17 million FIL destroyed, about 110,000 FIL (no more than 1% of the total network burn) were over-burned. Among the 1,185 miners, the top 100 miners in the network accounted for 92.7% of the penalties, and most of them were caused by penalties on large miners. The main reasons are as follows: Comparison of miners’ computing power and accumulated penalties, source: IPFS Force Zone, 2021-03 Penalties caused by early changes in the Filecoin network. Since the space race, Filecoin has upgraded its Louts version from v0.5.0 to v1.5.0 more than 20 times, and has proposed more than 10 FIPs. The Filecoin network is gradually maturing, and in this process, early miners are also punished for the unstable spending of the network. The small-step trial and error penalty for early miners. Miners will always seek the best solution in different versions. The main penalties are: a drop in computing power and a three-fold penalty for packing orders that should not be packed. Miners need to pay the trial cost in the process of seeking the best solution. Penalties for unstable operation and maintenance of small miners. At the current stage, large miners have the conditions and experience to find the most suitable Gas control algorithm; however, due to insufficient operation and maintenance experience or technology, small miners find it difficult to quickly find a solution, which leads to penalties, and even a group of small miners have a cumulative penalty greater than the cumulative penalty of large miners (the red box in the figure: the cumulative penalty of small miners on the left > the cumulative penalty of large miners on the right).
The above penalties are mainly due to the instability of the Filecoin network and the trial and error costs of miners. However, as the network becomes more stable, the accumulated penalties increase and decrease slowly. Only new miners repeat the same mistakes and get used to the penalty rules. However, after FIP-10 comes into effect, SubmitWindowedPoSt does not need to be put online for immediate proof. Due to the influence of "lucky mentality", a new type of penalty phenomenon may appear (the minimum fine for discovering a faulty sector is 20FIL), which will further expand the penalty accumulation. 2. Main Gas Fee Composition (Basic Burning and ProveCommit): FIP Proposal Optimization and Adjustment to Reduce Deadweight Losses As of February 8, the total basic burning, excess burning and miner tips of the Filecoin network totaled 9.8 million FIL, of which basic burning accounted for 95.03%, excess burning accounted for 4.76% and miner tips accounted for 0.21%, with the majority of the proportion being mainly due to basic burning. Vertical composition of Filecoin’s total burning fee, source: IPFS Force Zone, 2021-2-8 From a horizontal comparison, Filecoin's main burning is divided into PreCommit, ProveCommit and SubmitWindowedPoSt, among which ProveCommit accounts for the highest proportion of 69.49%. Horizontal composition of Filecoin’s total burning fee, source: IPFS Force Zone, 2021-2-8 To sum up the above horizontal and vertical comparisons, we can see that the main consumption of Filecoin is base burning, and the base is mainly consumed by ProveCommit. Therefore, miners are currently submitting batch ProveCommit aggregations to the chain for FIP-13 and adjusting the coefficient according to the Gas Fee to reduce the overall base burning volume. Among them, ProveCommit depends on the growth rate of the Filecoin network, that is, in the short term, the growth rate of the computing power of the entire network will increase by an average of 1PiB per hour. At present, the network is relatively congested and it is difficult to drop sharply in the short term. It can only be optimized for some unnecessary consumption, such as failure information in ProveCommit (accounting for about 2% of ProveCommit) and over-burning (accounting for about 2% of ProveCommit). The main solutions are as follows: The failure rate is mainly caused by information backlog, which leads to too much expired information being uploaded to the chain. One direction is to increase the information gas fee to improve the push utilization rate; Excess burn is mainly the GasLimit/GasUsed parameter, which can ensure that the information is received smoothly and reduce excessive burn.
3. Excess Burn: SubmitWindowedPoSt is more worthy of attention than ProveCommit Data from February 8 shows that even if the excess burning accounts for no more than 5% of all burning, there are still many issues worth analyzing and solving before the FIP-10 proposal takes effect. For example, the overall burning of SubmitWindowedPoSt is nearly 20% less than that of PreCommitSector, but the excess burning ratio is about 3 times that of PreCommitSector. Therefore, the excess burning of SubmitWindowedPoSt is a problem worth exploring and solving before FIP-10. Excess burn comparison, source: IPFS Force Zone, 2020-2-8 The solution to the excess burning of SubmitWindowedPoSt was mentioned in "How to "save money" in Filecoin mining". Currently, ForcePool has achieved an excess burning of 0 for SubmitWindowedPoSt. IV. Important factors affecting gas fees and solutions In general, the main reasons why Gas Fee is too high or exceeds the average level are: Too high Gas Used, unreasonable GasLimit/GasUsed parameter adjustment, GasFeeCap valve-style parameter adjustment, node sector size, failure rate and penalty. Gas Used is too high: Controlling the cluster size and computing power growth has a more obvious effect, so as to reduce excess burning and basic burning. The high Gas Used is mainly because the Gas Used of large miners is generally higher than that of small miners. Replacing the small cluster computing power growth is a way to change. In addition, the node strictly controls the growth rate and the node data information is appropriately "slimmed down".
Adjust the GasLimit/GasUsed parameters to the optimal value. Set GasLimit/GasUsed to reasonable parameters for over-burning, mainly to avoid setting GasLimit too high. Let GasLimit close to GasUsed, which can reduce or avoid over-burning. For this part, you can adjust according to the following rules.
Source: Filecoin GitHub, 2020-11-17 GasFeeCap valve-style parameter adjustment. Different miners have a certain control over their costs, and can set the GasFeeCap valve based on their cost calculations, and decide whether to increase computing power based on the actual BaseFee situation.
Node sector size: 32/64GiB sectors are used to increase computing power. According to the fluctuation of Base Fee, 64GiB sectors and 32GiB sectors are used to solve or alleviate the Gas problem, so as to dynamically adjust the Gas and packaging speed.
Penalty: The threefold penalty for orders that should not be packaged and the penalty for SubmitWindowedPoSt off-chain proof are still worth paying attention to. The penalty for computing power has been relaxed, and miners can recover within the effective time; the threefold penalty for orders that should not be packaged can be packaged after order screening; and the minimum penalty for SubmitWindowedPoSt off-chain proof is 20FIL, which is worth it for miners to always ensure the failure and repair of sectors.
For most of the above problems, the Force Zone has already started to solve them well. As the network gradually matures and technology is explored, new problems and better solutions will continue to be discovered, and we will continue to explore solutions. On the road of "saving money", we will continue to move forward with a multi-dimensional and meticulous attitude! Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law.
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