Improper behavior will be subject to slashing! Please check "Filecoin Function Introduction: Slashing"

Every miner who provides storage capacity to the network needs to stake a certain amount of FIL. If the miner is negligent or malicious, the miner's node will be "slashed" or forced to hand over a portion of the stake. After all, this is about the reputation and reliability of the network. In this way, the strong economic disincentive created by the slashing prevents miners from behaving badly to a certain extent.

Therefore, slashing is a built-in disincentive that requires miners to behave well or risk losing their stake and storage capacity, which keeps all miners on the Filecoin network honest and trustworthy.

Miner nodes may be cut in the following three cases:

1. When a miner deletes data before the storage deal expires (breaking the contract slashing).

2. When a miner fails to submit a proof of spacetime within the specified time (storage failure slashing).

3. When miners attempt to fork Filecoin or manipulate consensus proof elections (consensus slashing).

In each of these cases, miners have broken their commitment to the network.

The storage partitions where miners store data on the Filecoin network are called "sectors". Within each sector, miners can sign storage transaction contracts with customers and provide transaction pledges to ensure that the transactions can be properly maintained. The protocol requires miners to provide at least a minimum amount of pledge for basic guarantees, and if the transaction is terminated, the pledge will be reduced. Miners can also provide higher transaction pledges to reflect higher service levels and reliability to potential customers.

The Filecoin network expects miners to continue to store clients' files for the period specified in the storage contract: miners need to keep all sectors online and available until the end of the contract period. Some miners may not be able to meet this expectation, may breach the contract before the expiration of the contract, or ignore the commitment to continue to store client data.

There are two ways for miners to default: one is that their committed storage sectors are offline before the contract expiration date, and the other is to voluntarily terminate the contract early. Miners who voluntarily terminate the contract need to pay a termination fee. Miners who are completely unable to keep their storage sectors online will be slashed; part of their stake will be confiscated and their computing power will be reduced.

As mentioned above, Filecoin uses a cryptographic protocol (proof system) to verify the storage operations performed by miners for the network and ensure that miners provide storage as promised. Part of this proof system is Filecoin's unique Proof of Spacetime (PoSt), through which miners are challenged with random cryptographic challenges (WindoPoSt) every day and can only respond to WindoPoSt if they can access the customer data they promised to store. This verifies whether they actually provided the storage.

The Filecoin protocol considers a miner node that has at least one WindowPoSt failure to be in a failed state. Miners will lose storage capacity on the failed sector. Miners can only restore their sector power after successfully responding to a subsequent WindowPoSt.

If a miner node remains in this state for two consecutive days, it will be slashed every day, incurring storage failure fees. Because Filecoin only incentivizes reliable and useful storage, it is critical for storage clients to know that all data is reliably stored on the Filecoin network. If a sector reaches the maximum allowed number of consecutive failure days, all rewards earned by the sector and its initial stake will be slashed.

Blocks on the Filecoin blockchain are arranged by block height. At each block height, miners participate in a consensus proof election to decide who will mine the next block of the Filecoin blockchain and receive the block reward. The consensus proof is elected based on the storage capacity of the miners. This consensus proof election protocol is called Expected Consensus (EC).

In a consensus proof election, each miner draws a random seed provided by a distributed random beacon (drand beacon). The miner then performs an election proof function on that random seed. If the value generated by the election proof function is valid, the miner is eligible to mine the block. When miners generate new blocks during EC, these blocks are gathered together to form "tipsets" (valid blocks generated in each round constitute a Tipset) and connected to the same block at the previous block height.

Filecoin's EC is unique in that many miners can win the consensus proof election: at each block height, different miners can generate multiple valid blocks at once. In order to avoid the Filecoin blockchain splitting or "forking" into multiple competing chains, miners must agree that the standard or real blockchain is the tipset with the greatest weight in the blockchain, that is, the tipset with the most blocks in history.

A consensus flaw occurs when two different blocks are mined at the same height. When this happens, the miner's storage is temporarily suspended and they are penalized.

Unlike storage failures and broken contracts, other miners in the Filecoin network must report consensus errors. In this case, slashing is not automatically performed. However, Filecoin miners have an incentive to report consensus errors. Any Filecoin miner who detects and reports a consensus error will become an attacker and receive a portion of the miner's stake that is slashed.

The Filecoin network employs slashing to provide strong economic disincentives for miner misconduct. Since misbehaving miners will suffer a loss of stake and hashrate, miners have less reason to ignore or otherwise endanger the Filecoin network. In this way, slashing helps give clients confidence that their data will be stored by miners exactly as promised. As such, slashing is a unique feature of the Filecoin protocol that protects the integrity, reliability, and reputation of Filecoin.