A brief discussion on Filecoin gas fees and mining status

Filecoin's gas is a "hot word" that has been discussed recently. The reason why it has attracted so much attention is that the gas fee has soared 3.601 million times from 100 atto FIL on November 7 to 3.601 nanoFIL (nano is 10 to the negative 9th power, atto is 10 to the negative 18th power) in just about a month. If gas is an investment target, then this performance is definitely outstanding. Unfortunately, the gas fee is more like a "fuel". The higher the price, the higher the cost of mining. The high gas fee often makes miners suffer.

On the browser, we can see the real-time status of the Filecoin network. The network produces 218,798 FIL in 24 hours, of which 25% are directly released, that is, 54,935 FIL are directly released. Together with the linear release, the daily release of the entire network is less than 100,000; and the current FIL destruction volume has reached 6,345,627 FIL. Due to the recent continuous increase in gas, this will lead to a destruction volume higher than the release volume, which means that miners may not make ends meet after a day of hard work.

When talking about Filecoin's gas fee, we have to mention Ethereum, because Filecoin currently uses the gas mechanism of Ethereum EIP1559, which is a mechanism proposed by Vitalik Buterin that has not yet been fully implemented on the Ethereum public chain. Because the design is relatively simple and reasonable, the Filecoin team decided to use EIP1559 first. According to EIP1559, the gas fee consists of two parts: basic fee + surcharge.

The basic fee is automatically calculated by the network and cannot be changed. At the same time, the basic fee is also directly destroyed. The surcharge can be understood as a tip. The amount of the surcharge is determined by the user. The higher the surcharge, the faster the response and the better the service, just like VIP service. This part of the fee is collected by the miners (we have previously had an article that has analyzed the gas fee and its surrounding terms in detail. Click on the picture below to read it) .

Many people will ask, since the gas fee is so high, will Filecoin officials just ignore it?

In fact, the official has also set up a FIP-5 proposal, which is committed to removing the expensive miner reward attribution calculation from PreCommitSector and ConfirmSectorProofsValid, thereby effectively reducing the consumption of gas fees, releasing chain bandwidth and reducing miner costs. In fact, on November 25, after the Filecoin network was upgraded to Lotus v1.2.0, the gas fee was indeed effectively reduced, but the good times did not last long. About five days later, the gas fee began to soar again and set a new high.

Why is it difficult to reduce gas fees?

Filecoin is expected to become the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain, connecting major public chains to solve the data storage problem of the blockchain, so we always compare Filecoin to a highway; using the highway as an analogy, miners drive on the Filecoin highway. As the number of miners increases, the highway will become more and more congested. When encountering windy, rainy, foggy weather and poor road conditions, the traffic will inevitably become even more congested.

The car is sometimes turned off and sometimes started, or it is always in the starting state but moving at a snail's pace. This situation often consumes the most fuel and also has the highest gas fee.

From the above, in essence, the high gas fee is because there are too many miners on the Filecoin network, especially too many active miners. Not only are old miners working hard to mine, but there are also batches of new miners entering the market almost every day. The more miners there are, the more congested the network is, and the higher the gas fee is.

In addition to the fundamental reason, there is another reason that cannot be ignored, which starts with EIP1559. In the design mechanism of EIP1559, Gas = basic fee + additional fee.

The surcharge refers to the tip that users give to miners. The more you give, the miners will give priority to packing for you.

If you must ask why you have to tip and why you have to ask miners to package messages, it is because Filecoin is a storage-type blockchain, which has a consensus mechanism called "Proof of Space and Time". Proof of Space and Time means that every half an hour, miners have to prove to the network that I am storing data for customers, I have not run away, and please do not punish my collateral.

In addition to messages at the proof-of-time level, there are many other types of messages. In short, no matter what type of message it is, as long as you want to be processed first, you have to pay a surcharge, so the surcharge is actually more like a bidding mechanism, there is no highest, only higher.

What do you think about gas and Filecoin mining?

Zeng Guofan once said: "The best life is a long and steady stream of water." The same is true for Filecoin mining. Working hard every day, earning money every day, taking your time, everything is getting better, and the future is promising.