Filecoin stands at a crossroads

Juan, founder of IPFS & Filecoin, said in his keynote speech at this year's Wanxiang Summit that Fielcoin's deeper mission is to create a distributed, efficient and powerful foundation for human information and to change the basic business cases and cost structures of storage providers in today's economy.

It is undeniable that this is a very subversive mission, and it has also become the unanimous sermon declaration of many stakeholders in the three years since the launch of Filecoin. During this period, Filecoin has been questioned a lot due to frequent delays in its launch, and after the mainnet was officially launched, due to issues such as pre-collateralized coins, these visions fell into an awkward situation in the fierce game between miners and officials.

When the halo of public attention encountered waves of doubts from the Slack community and the outside world, the extreme contrast prompted a chaotic scene within the walls of Filecoin. Discussions on related topics such as distributed storage, lack of economic model design, and the gap between Chinese and foreign innovators not only showed that Filecoin's subversive mission is facing shocks and challenges to a certain extent, but also made Juan's label of "dictator" more intriguing.

Author | Wang Dashu

01

Mining boom supported by wealth effect

“No one stipulates that miners must dedicate themselves to Filecoin for a long time, and miners have no such obligation. When Filecoin no longer has a money-making effect, miners are free to leave.” Song Jiang, who often finds faults and is even considered a "thorn", said this in the Slack community not long ago.

This is not the first time that Song Jiang has expressed strong opinions. He appears at almost every important node in the development of Filecoin, especially when the Filecoin pre-mortgage issue caused a sensation some time ago.

At that time, the circulation of FIL in the market was far from meeting the actual needs of storage miners. For this reason, the Filecoin community urgently passed the FIP 0004 proposal, announcing the direct release of 25% of storage miner rewards, and the remaining 75% of block rewards would be released linearly within 180 days according to the original rules, in an attempt to solve the pledge and other problems caused by the scarcity of FIL in the early days.

However, in reality, the direct release of 25% storage miner rewards did not stimulate a large number of miners to participate in mining, and the growth of the total network computing power is still very slow. There are two reasons for this. First, after the release of 25% storage miner rewards, the number of prosperous FIL still cannot support the entry of large computing power (most miners are still waiting for investors to be willing to solve the pledge coin problem themselves), and second, the official lending plan has not yet been implemented, and miners are waiting for the implementation of other official solutions.

The essence of these two reasons is as Song Jiang said, Filecoin's current economic model weakens the money-making effect. In addition to his sharp words on this level, he is also very critical of the official team.

“In my opinion, the official team is a group of immature children, full of idealism and fairy-tale fantasies about the future. They expect all participants of Filecoin to be close to each other, work together, and create a better future together. Little do they know that in the blockchain world, officials, miners, exchanges, big investors, retail investors, and market makers are full of cruel games. They are a group of beasts fighting each other on the grassland, competing for territory and the right to survive. And all these games must be maintained through precise economic models and consensus must be reached through open source code. If the thinking does not change, how can a perfect system be designed?”

These arguments will inevitably arouse resentment in the mining community, and some people even attack him as a troll, a talker, and Sun Yuchen's lackey. But no matter what Song Jiang's intention is, the craze for grabbing the first mine in the mining circle since this year has exposed people's profit-seeking nature.

"90% of the miners are Chinese. With the wealth effect of Bitcoin as a precedent, who wouldn't want to make some quick money while there's a good story?" Xia Bing (pseudonym), an investor who has been paying attention to the distributed storage field since March, told Chain Catcher that everyone says they are investing in value, but in private, the only real thing is making money. For miners, the better the reputation of Filecoin and the more participants there are, the more beneficial it will be. So even if they are dissatisfied, they don't want to see a bad public opinion environment.

Although many discussions have not yet reached a conclusion, in the short term, Filecoin's great mission seems to be just a preacher's declaration supported by the wealth effect, and has not yet reflected other values.

02

"Juan doesn't understand Chinese miners"

"Juan really wants to build a business, but Chinese investors just want to make money. If miners mine a lot of coins and sell them to make a fortune, will they still work hard in the future?" During the discussion on the design of Filecoin's economic model, a miner named Lu, while standing on the official side, expressed some recognition of the founder Juan.

But despite this, the miner still has some concerns. "Maybe Juan is more inclined to network security, but other factors cannot be ruled out. After all, human hearts are unpredictable. I think the government should satisfy the miners first, then the market, and then the market will satisfy the investors."

Due to a series of problems such as the subsequent influx of 1.5 million FIL into the market, more and more doubts have emerged in the public opinion environment, such as why the test coins became real coins and official dictatorship.

Official member WHY also explained: "This part of the currency (2.5%) was reserved as early as 2017. The purpose is to resist the impact of exchange price manipulation on FIL after FIL is launched. This is part of the market stabilization plan, which has become an industry standard. These plans attract companies to provide liquidity and stability to the market in the early stage after issuance (when there is a risk of price fluctuations). "

But it still seems to lack credibility. "Although Juan's IPFS is awesome, there are problems with the Filecoin economic model. Early investors and official coins can be dumped into the market at any time to affect the stable operation of the economic system. Various pledges and releases of locked positions are beneficial to safe storage, but from the perspective of economic balance, it is simply a mess." said a miner named Voldemort in the Slack community.

In fact, this shows to a certain extent that although Chinese miners have little contact with Juan, they often define him as a dictator and geek. In the game process, most people still speculate on Juan from the perspective of human nature, but compared with these, Juan seems to have no understanding of Chinese miners at all.

“The mining community is great, there are tens of thousands of people using Filecoin around the world, most of the people I’ve met are down to earth and usually very friendly, they are all competitive and supportive of each other, just like good Web3 participants, there are only a few bad guys who try to abuse the mechanism and try to create problems for their own benefit.”

It is not difficult to find that Juan’s large number of speeches, on the one hand, are to recharge the faith of miners and investors, and on the other hand, it means that he may not really understand Chinese miners, or he is unwilling to compromise for the interests of Chinese miners.

Throughout the development of Filecoin over the years, Juan has always been known for his straightforwardness and idealism. For example, Juan said in a video speech at the 2019 Shenzhen IPFS Industry Development Conference that the official has not cooperated with any individual or organization in China so far, and does not recommend the purchase of any mining hardware. The official mining hardware specifications have not yet been released. This is equivalent to a direct blow to the sales of Filecoin mining machines, which are in full swing, causing dissatisfaction among a large number of Filecoin ecological partners.

In April this year, Juan also angrily criticized Sun Yuchen's acquisition of BitTorrent on Twitter. He said that he recognized BitTorrent's previous technology and team, but did not recognize Sun Yuchen and BitTorrent under his leadership. The two have since formed a feud, so much so that when Filecoin encountered difficulties in its later development, Sun Yuchen would occasionally "speak up for justice."

In this huge game of interests, Juan spoke in such a sharp and straightforward manner. It seems not difficult to understand why Filecoin was caught up in the "fork gate" and why various opinions emerged in the Slack community.

Juan and the Filecoin he leads are standing at the crossroads of ideals and reality. Faced with the contradiction caused by the FIL coin price between how to provide long-term incentives to old miners and how to attract new miners to enter the market, which path they will choose and what future they will move towards is still a huge unknown.