Is Filecoin facing a space race or a battle for StarCraft?

On September 15, the first round of Filecoin's space race came to an end, with 356 miners from 32 countries on six continents participating in the competition. Although there were some minor errors in the process, the overall result was far beyond expectations.

What the outside world did not expect was that the space race had just ended, and the authorities announced the next round of space race. When the news first came out, many people thought that this was another excuse for Filecoin to stand down. According to official information, compared with the first round, the focus of the second round of space race is on economic testing. The authorities hope to effectively verify the economic model through the second space race.

In the eyes of some miners, the second space race can also be a positive thing, which is equivalent to the official giving everyone benefits in the gap before the main network is launched. You should know that the average number of tokens released by the space race every day is about twice the expected number of tokens for the main network launch. Moreover, to a certain extent, the test network of the second space race can be regarded as the main network.

But at the last moment before the mainnet was officially launched, the voices calling for a fork of Filecoin grew louder and louder. This demand had already appeared in the early stages of the space race, and a series of rules officially introduced in the first round of the space race further magnified the problem.

Protests under great pressure

On the eve of the space race, a miner with the pseudonym "Song Jiang" posted an article titled "Filecoin, A "Centralized" Storage Network" in the #fil-lobby channel of Filecoin slack, directly pointing out that the space race has problems such as lack of fairness, monopoly by large miners, and the people who deal the cards are also playing the cards.

During the space race, Filecoin miners complained bitterly. Due to the bugs and stability issues of the test network itself, miners had to keep track of the official code dynamics at all times. If they were not careful, their computing power would be reduced and their rewards would be reset to zero.

However, what is more important than the miners’ protest is that Filecoin has adopted a very complex system design to achieve effective storage, which has led to Filecoin’s development towards a single technical solution and economic model. The low scalability also limits the fault tolerance of the entire system. It can be said that once Filecoin has a major loophole in its technology or economic model, there is no turning back. In short, most of the pressure and risks in the entire Filecoin ecosystem are hanging on the miners.

Behind the economic dispute is dissatisfaction with centralized governance

For a long time, the controversial point of Filecoin has been the economic model. Behind it is the dissatisfaction of miners with the official centralized governance. In many cases, without sufficient communication with the mining community, the official directly releases new rules, which catches many miners off guard and can only passively accept them. More importantly, miners, who already bear huge pressure and risks, are forced to digest the risks brought by these new rules.

In the economic model design of Filecoin, the computing power obtained by storage miners for packaging data is divided into two types: original value computing power and effective computing power. The so-called effective computing power refers to the computing power obtained by miners for storing the data of verified users (officially verified users), while the original value computing power refers to the computing power obtained by storing data other than verified users. Filecoin officials believe that the data of verified users is "valuable", so it should be given more weight in block incentives.

In the current economic parameter setting, the effective computing power is 10 times the original computing power. The transparent rules themselves are understandable. Filecoin officials plan to adopt the form of DAO organization to determine and verify user qualifications in the future, but this link is currently centralized.

Filecoin launched the Filecoin Discover project in May this year. Its original intention was to allow miners to store some useful data in the Filecoin network, such as human genes and meteorological data. The official will store valuable and public data in hard disks for sale. The data on these hard disks are marked as "valid data", and encapsulating these data will obtain effective computing power. The probability of effective computing power producing a block is 10 times the original computing power. In order to obtain more effective computing power, miners can only purchase Filecoin Discover hard disks in addition to encapsulating the data of verified users. So some people accused Filecoin of using its identity as a "referee" to seek profits.

What is even more surprising is that the so-called "valuable" data is actually worthless. According to miners who received the Filecoin Discover hard drive, "the hard drive claimed to be 8TB has a data capacity of only 26GB. The technicians randomly searched for a few files to read and could not read any byte of data at all."

Is the fork trend real or just a gimmick?

Miners are the providers of the entire network resources and are the key to the operation of Filecoin. If the interests of miners are not guaranteed, miners who have invested a lot of hardware resources will inevitably promote the fork of Filecoin. At present, the fork may be inevitable. On September 18, 2020, two project parties announced the fork of Filecoin within one day.

The first Filecoin fork project Filecoin Vision

In the early morning of September 18, someone anonymously published an article titled "Filecoin Vision Manifesto" on GitHub, announcing the birth of the first Filecoin fork project FILV.

First, the manifesto clearly points out six controversial points about Filecoin:

Ø The mining share has dropped from 70% to about 30% in the early stage of the main network

Ø Linear release of pre-mortgage and post-block rewards

Ø Window PoSt fails within half an hour, resulting in token penalties, and must be repaired the next day

Ø The committed data verified by the validator has 10 times the storage capacity

Ø Protocol Labs tends to use ethics to constrain miners’ behavior rather than on-chain rules

Ø Protocol Labs owns 15% of the tokens and the Foundation owns 5% of the tokens

The corresponding FILV will implement the following improvements:

Ø The mining share increased to 99%

Ø Reduce the pre-mortgage amount to allow every miner to easily participate in mining

Ø Window PoSt allows for tolerant retry submission

Ø If the Garbage sector is lost or disconnected, there will be no penalty for the mortgage coins

Ø Leniency in punishment: punishment must be based on malicious behavior and never be excessive

Ø Malicious behavior that cannot be well identified by on-chain rules will never be punished

Ø Punishments will be predetermined but delayed to avoid a domino effect

Ø No validator, no verified commitment data

Ø Promote morality, but prefer to rationalize the rules on the chain, and do not exclude human selfishness

FileCoinCash also followed suit

With the Filecoin Vision at the beginning, others followed up immediately. On the afternoon of September 18, Han Weiping, chairman of MIX Group, announced at the "World Mining Conference - Xiamen Station" that Filecoin would be forked, and the project was named FileCoinCash. Filecoincash inherits the ideals of IPFS and adopts a different solution from Filecoin to implement the vision of IPFS distributed storage network.

Filecoincash will improve Filecoin's shortcomings in seven aspects:

Ø SHA256 algorithm upgraded to SHA512;

Ø 11 layers of serial sealing calculation reduced to 5 layers;

Ø Adding Layer 2 to improve TPS, support a wide range of applications such as smart contracts, and enable a market economy where the network scale can expand rapidly;

Ø Dynamic pre-mortgage to fully release the benefits to miners;

Ø The validity of private data is decided by the individual, which is fully democratic, while public data needs to be reviewed and is free and redundant;

Ø Develop and govern together with the community, fully using democracy to fight against dictatorship;

Ø Improve the economic model.

It is understood that the project opened the Github code repository on September 19, started the test network simultaneously, and launched the main network in October, inviting the entire community to jointly initiate and govern.

In addition to Filecoin Vision and FileCoinCash, 1475 co-founder Andy revealed at the World Mining Conference-Xiamen Station that 5-6 teams are in contact with big miners to prepare to fork Filecoin.

The second round of the space race will begin on the 25th of this month. Is the fork trend at this time a gimmick to put pressure on the authorities or is it for real? As mentioned earlier, Filecoin miners have already invested a lot of costs and can no longer turn back. Unless the new fork project can provide benefits far exceeding the opportunity cost, it is difficult for these fork projects to have any substantial impact on Filecoin. Forking is more of a community's helplessness.

It is also important to note that Filecoin is not the only player in the distributed storage space. Crust in the Polkadot ecosystem is also catching up. Its TEE solution can significantly reduce the threshold for miners to participate, and its overall product and technology route is more "real" . It can be said that in addition to the space race, the distributed storage space will face the situation of StarCraft in the future.