8btc exclusive | Filecoin miners on strike? Let's hear what the top miners and officials say

On the evening of October 17, a report was circulated in WeChat Moments: Five leading miners of the Xianhe Group collectively stopped operations in protest. For example, Zhihe Cloud's mining machines dropped sharply from more than 8,000 to 276, and the equivalent of 1,475 and other four mining machines has been reduced to 0. The equivalent of Shikong Cloud's mining machines has also dropped from more than 11,000 last night to 1,870 now. In addition, many companies have chosen not to increase their computing power.

On the other hand, Lai Chuhang, the founder of the IPFS Chinese community and chairman of Spacetime Cloud Technology, posted on WeChat Moments: "The mainnet is online, and all miners are stopped there. It's really not a so-called 'demonstration', it's helplessness! No one has coins for mortgage mining! Stupid X PL (head of the protocol lab), stupid X economic model!"

Filecoin’s economic model is unfavorable to miners. This was a foregone conclusion before the mainnet was launched. After the mainnet was launched, the problem has become a matter of life and death? We interviewed several top miners and let’s hear what they said specifically.

Why are miners on strike? Whose cheese has been moved by the Filecoin protocol?

Before showing the miners' ideas, let's first understand why Filecoin's economic model conflicts significantly with the interests of miners.

Filecoin mining requires pledging Filecoin's token FIL. This pledge mechanism is divided into two parts: block reward pledge and pre-pledge.

Block reward pledge means that the block rewards obtained by miners will be released and unlocked linearly within 180 days, so miners can only get the full reward 180 days after mining the block, and the disposable FIL obtained in the early stage of block production is very small.

Pre-mortgage means that miners need to provide FIL for mortgage before packaging sectors to ensure that miners can complete the promised life cycle of the sectors and will not harm network security for short-term interests. The purpose of this is to keep miners online for a long time. If miners shut down, the experience of storage users will be greatly damaged.

Here comes the problem.

However, today miners actually have a lot of mining machines, but not enough FIL! This means that miners who have prepared for many years have machines but cannot mine. Of course, miners can go to the secondary market to buy FIL to mine, but there is a question of whether it is worth it. Currently, the price of FIL on Huobi is $45.

Previously, Zhang Rihe, CEO and founder of Xianhe System, mentioned in the live broadcast of "8 Questions on Major Events" that the Filecoin economic model is still good from the original intention, but there are problems. "No matter how the economic model is changed, the general principle is that the miners' income tokens must be more than the tokens they spend on average across the entire network, so that the economic model can work well. If the cake is not cut well, the project may fail, which is a very serious problem."

As for the current situation, Zhang Rihe also laughed at himself helplessly: "The prophecy came true."

On October 15, the effective computing power of the entire network was 566.9PIB. Today, this figure is 589.6PIB. Therefore, judging from the data, the computing power growth in the past two days has indeed been quite slow.

Miners have nowhere to go? Let’s hear what the top miners and Filecoin officials have to say

Babbitt interviewed several Filecoin top miners on this issue. This is what they said.

Zhan Xiaoming, CEO of Interstellar, believes that the problem faced by miners is obvious. The current economic model cannot enable miners to run at full computing power, and miners have no money to buy coins, so the network power growth is slow. At present, Interstellar will use some of the released tokens for mortgage mining every day to increase computing power. "According to Filecoin's economic white paper, this is the result, and I am not surprised at all."

“In the previous space race, those who performed well did not need to buy much FIL. Those who performed poorly must also want to participate in mining, so they will buy it when the price of the currency is slightly lower.” He believes that if the price of FIL is lower than US$20, then many miners will buy FIL and then pledge it for mining.

Zhan Xiaoming believes that the current way for miners to deal with this is to wait for the official to modify the economic model. "In the future, miners and project owners will have a game process until both sides reach a balance point. If the official does not modify the economic model, miners will continue to slowly increase computing power until they reach the mortgage balance point. This time will be slightly longer, perhaps 3 months, so miners need to communicate well with customers, as there will be no income for three months."

Zhan Xiaoming also mentioned that there will be a FIP004 next week, which will release 25% in advance, which is relatively friendly to miners. After implementation, it should be able to reach about 80% of the full speed. "Now most people choose not to increase and sell directly. It seems that no one dares to pull the market now."

Lai Chuhang, chairman of Spacetime Cloud, said: "If this situation continues, miners will have to buy coins at high prices in the secondary market, which is obviously not worthwhile and will not work. Now everyone is waiting for an official response. If the official ignores the situation of the miner community, the community consensus may split and the project may be worrying."

When Andy, the founder of 1475, was asked whether there was a real strike, he said no, it was the economic model, so there was no way to buy coins as collateral to increase computing power. This meant that they had no intention of increasing computing power now.

Zhang Rihe of Xianhe System responded: "The customers supported by Xianhe Technology have different (computing power) growth strategies. Some do not grow, some grow. There is no downtime or strike. We just execute the instructions of our customers."

In response to the widespread "opposition" from miners, a member of the Protocol Labs finally released a message in the evening. He said that they heard the voices of miners and suggested that miners pay attention to the FPI-004 proposal, which is a specific suggestion that can address some concerns.

“The network can only get better if we collaborate. It’s up to the community to decide whether to adopt a particular improvement. In general, the ecosystem is better if people with ideas for improvements can also help build them.”

Note: Jia Xiaobie, host of "8 Questions About Major Events", also contributed to this article.