Starting from the birth of Filecoin, why is fork becoming "what everyone wants"?

“IPFS wants to achieve data privacy and permanent storage, but Filecoin is gradually deviating from this original intention.”

At the just-concluded Xiamen World Mining Conference, MIX Chairman Han Weiping expressed the voice of the eagerly awaited Filecoin community.

Since the Industrial Revolution started the accelerator of human civilization evolution, the discussion on science and technology and humanities has never stopped. Today, when the Internet is dominated by giants, people's concerns about data privacy have triggered reform movements again and again. Correction through humanistic means such as laws is obviously a temporary solution, but not a fundamental solution. Distributed storage, which is expected to eliminate the possibility of evil from the technology itself, has begun to emerge and has attracted widespread attention and discussion.

Filecoin is the most watched practitioner of the "technological revolution" of distributed storage. However, three years after its launch, Filecoin is at the center of controversy, carrying not only people's expectations for distributed storage networks, but also facing community doubts about the centralization of the team.

Filecoin is born: an incentive network built on the IPFS protocol

Let’s start with the earliest story of Filecoin and clarify step by step how it became a distributed network that digital nomads have high hopes for.

In May 2014, Juan Benet of Stanford University published a draft white paper describing the concept of a "peer-to-peer distributed file system", which was the earliest prototype of the IPFS protocol. IPFS is a content-addressed, peer-to-peer hypermedia transmission protocol designed to improve the low transmission efficiency and single point failure of the http protocol that has dominated the Internet for many years.

In order to better implement the concept of distributed file transfer protocol, Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs in early 2015, focusing on the research and development of IPFS, and applied to join the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator. A year later, Protocol Labs created four technical modules: libp2p, IPLD, multiformats, and Orbit. IPFS achieved amazing growth. By June 2017, the IPFS protocol had stored 5 billion files. At this time, the blockchain industry was advancing by leaps and bounds, and the decentralized nature of blockchain was naturally compatible with IPFS, and the two hit it off.

Protocol Labs early team, from Twitter

Soon after, Protocol Labs released the Filecoin white paper, and an incentive network based on blockchain technology built on the IPFS protocol was born. With the halo of IPFS and Protocol Labs, Filecoin raised a huge amount of US$257 million in the subsequent initial token offering, setting a record for ICO financing that year.

Filecoin is a distributed content storage and distribution network. It uses a proof-of-work mechanism similar to Bitcoin to incentivize network miners to provide data storage and retrieval services to users in exchange for native token incentives, thereby achieving an incentive-compatible economic system on the IPFS protocol.

We have to admit that with strong engineering capabilities and abundant funds, the beautiful picture outlined by Filecoin seems to be just around the corner. But there is inevitably a gap in reality. Filecoin, which started with a great victory, does not seem to have a smooth road back. Due to miscalculation of engineering difficulty, the Filecoin mainnet was repeatedly postponed and gradually fell into silence. Until this year, the test network and space race with landmark progress took turns to appear on the stage, and Filecoin once again returned to the spotlight of the public. However, as the Filecoin network gradually appeared in front of people, problems gradually surfaced.

Filecoin Governance Controversy: Moving Towards Centralization

The most stimulating debate is that some of the actions taken by the Filecoin team during the testnet and space race are full of strong centralization flavor. Distributed storage blockchain is different from DApp platforms such as Ethereum. Filecoin can lack a strong developer ecosystem, but it cannot lack the support of miners scattered around the world.

However, in the face of its grand vision of building a "distributed network that stores the most important information of human society", Filecoin chose to sacrifice the interests of some miners and even bore the stigma of a "dictator".

Valid storage and authenticated users

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.

Official hard drive Filecoin Discover

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."

Miners suffer unfair treatment

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.

Recently, the authorities announced a penalty measure for a few nodes in the competition. These nodes were deemed cheating by the authorities because they only packaged data for themselves. This was originally because miners exploited loopholes in the rules. The authorities transferred the consequences to the miners without communicating the new rules in advance. This arbitrary style of work not only ignores the interests of miners, but also exposes its lack of community governance spirit.

The world has suffered from Filecoin for a long time. The mining community is quite dissatisfied with Filecoin's strict economic model design and high mining threshold.

More important than the miners’ protests is that Filecoin has adopted a very complex system design to achieve effective storage, which has resulted in Filecoin being able to develop 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.

So, is there any good way to protect the interests of the participants and promote the development of distributed storage networks? Pre-forking may be the antidote.

Undercurrent: Fork may be inevitable

After pointing out a series of problems with Filecoin, miner Song Jiang said, “If the authorities continue along the current path and retain these centralized designs, it will seriously violate the spirit of blockchain. If this is the final result, someone will inevitably fork the entire network. I will definitely participate in it then.”

Interestingly, "Song Jiang" is the representative of resistance to centralized rule in "Water Margin". This may be the voice of many miners who love and hate Filecoin.

However, forking is not a 100% profitable business. It itself has great risks. Bitcoin is a lesson for us. If it succeeds, it will gain both fame and fortune, but if it fails, it will be blamed for splitting the community.

In fact, a better approach is to pre-fork and start the forked chain before the Filecoin mainnet goes online. This will not only have no impact on the Filecoin network, but also provide reference and reference for the development of Filecoin.

We discussed the increasingly centralization problem of the Filecoin team. In addition to avoiding centralization in governance, the more important thing for forked chains is to improve the shortcomings of Filecoin's mechanism design.

How to design a better distributed storage network?

To design a better distributed storage network, we must first understand the problems in Filecoin’s mechanism design.

Filecoin mechanism design flaws

Han Weiping pointed out seven major problems facing the development of Fliecoin at the Xiamen World Expo:

1. File hash value calculation is not friendly to Intel storage instruction set;

2. The sealing process is complex and consumes too much computing resources;

3. Low TPS limits the number of network nodes.

4. The pre-mortgage is too high, which is beneficial to investors but not to miners;

5. The official dataset restricts the use of storage networks, and data security is not high;

6. Frequent major technical changes;

7. The blockchain economic model is unreasonable.

Overall, the problems with the Filecoin mechanism mainly manifest themselves in two aspects: technical solutions and economic models.

Technical solution: In terms of storage proof, Filecoin uses complex replication proof and space-time proof to verify that miners have indeed stored data and have not lost data during the life cycle of the sector. In terms of data encapsulation, up to 11 layers of serial sealing calculations greatly increase the sealing cost and time. The high cost of proof and sealing data not only wastes computing resources, but also increases the hardware threshold of mining machines.

Economic model: Excessive pursuit of effective storage, design of multiple mortgages, reward and penalty mechanisms; too high pre-mortgage, which is beneficial to investors but not to miners. And Filecoin officials have the right to adjust economic parameters. This means that the official has become the hand of God in this economic system and can intervene in the operation of the economic system from a macro perspective.

In addition, Filecoin's completely free data transmission method is contrary to the political and ethical challenges of public information, and it is difficult to effectively regulate the content, which will lead to the rampant illegal content on the network and the formation of a lawless place.

The first fork: Filecoincash inherits the ideals of IPFS

In fact, as the calls for forking grow louder, some teams have begun to take practical actions to solve the problems of Filecoin. After analyzing the current limitations of the Filecoin network, Han Weiping announced the launch of the first forked project, Filecoincash, which uses a different solution from Filecoin to implement the vision of the IPFS distributed storage network.

Filecoincash will improve Filecoin's shortcomings in seven aspects:

• SHA256 algorithm upgraded to SHA512;

• The 11-layer serial sealing calculation is reduced to 5 layers;

• Adding Layer 2 improves TPS, supports a wide range of applications such as smart contracts, and enables a market economy where the network scale can expand rapidly;

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

• 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;

• Develop and govern together with the community, fully demonstrate democracy to fight against dictatorship;

• Improve the economic model.

Han Weiping said, "At present, Filecoincash has conducted extensive communication with the leading participants in the community and reached a consensus. It will open the Github code repository on September 19, continue to iterate the code, simultaneously start the test network, and launch the main network in October." He invited the entire community to jointly initiate and govern.

Filecoin itself has a grand vision and design, hoping to revolutionize the situation where Internet giants control user data through distributed storage technology, and is determined to expand the external utility of blockchain technology to "store important data for humans." Whether it is Filecoin or the exploration of Filecoincash, they are all seeds of humanity planted in the soil of technology, allowing humans to retain privacy and enjoy justice while advancing science and technology.

Finally, let me share a scene described in the science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem":

Hundreds of years later, human beings are facing the crisis of extinction. In order to preserve the remains of Earth civilization, humans have built an Earth Civilization Museum on Pluto to preserve Earth civilization data for 100 million years. The question is, how should information be preserved? Scientists have found through various studies that the most advanced quantum memory of human science and technology has a shelf life of only 500 years, USB flash drives can be preserved for up to 5,000 years, and CDs can be preserved for up to 100,000 years. These are too insignificant compared to 100 million years. The final conclusion is that the only known way to preserve information for about 100 million years is to carve words on stone!

This clip reveals the importance of storage to human civilization. This idea may be far-fetched, but who can say for sure?