Time and Space Cloud Lai Chuhang: How can we seize the era opportunity of Filecoin?

On September 7, Lai Chuhang, initiator of the IPFS China community and chairman of Space-Time Cloud Technology, was invited by Space-Time Unicom to share his views on topics such as the development history and future planning of Space-Time Cloud, the opportunities and application prospects of the IPFS & Filecoin era, and the Filecoin space race. The main contents are as follows.

Spacetime Cloud - the next generation leader in Internet ecology

First, Lai Chuhang, the founder of IPFS China Community and chairman of Spacetime Cloud Technology, introduced the development history of Spacetime Cloud to us: Spacetime Cloud Technology started as a community. At the end of 2017, it established the IPFS China Community to preach IPFS, which was a completely public welfare behavior at the time. Although Spacetime Cloud started to study Filecoin mining a long time ago, we did not sell a mining machine to the market before October 2019. When the company had no income, it still adhered to its original intention and paid out of its own pocket to do dozens of free IPFS sermons across the country.

Why did Spacetime Cloud sell mining machines so late? Because Filecoin mining not only has technical barriers, but also has complexity and volatility. Although Spacetime Cloud Technology's core technical team has 12 years of experience in the storage industry and ranks first in test networks such as the development test network and the Lotus test network, in the spirit of being responsible for customers, Spacetime Cloud only started to finalize the product and sell mining machines after testing the technical solution for nearly half a year.

Although Spacetime Cloud only began to provide mining technical solutions to the entire industry in November 2019, and encountered the troublesome epidemic during this period, relying on Spacetime Cloud's performance of ranking first in the entire network during the first and second tests of Filecoin, as well as the strong community foundation of the IPFS Chinese community, Spacetime Cloud quickly formed a "head effect" in the market.

At present, Spacetime Cloud has a relatively large influence in the entire industry. In addition, since its own solutions have been verified by the market and technology, compared with the companies that sold mining machines in the early days, such as the mining machines using Intel solutions and the home mining machines sold in the early days, these mining machines are actually unable to mine Filecoin. The mining machines launched by Spacetime Cloud Technology have basically not stepped on the pitfalls of hardware solutions, so Spacetime Cloud is not only responsible to customers, but also for the company, there is no bubble and it can go into battle lightly .

The corporate positioning of Spacetime Cloud is a distributed network operator; we can understand distributed network operators as companies such as China Mobile and China Unicom. In the future, we will develop in the direction of distributed network infrastructure construction, including distributed network traffic management, storage market management, etc.

The vision of Spacetime Cloud is to become the leader of the next generation Internet ecosystem; the next generation Internet refers to the next generation Internet based on blockchain technology represented by Bitcoin and distributed storage technology represented by solving blockchain storage. We hope to become the ecological leader of the next generation Internet, so we will not be limited to the construction of distributed network infrastructure. In the future, we will also incubate and invest in the web3.0 ecosystem.

The corporate mission of Spacetime Cloud is to build a better next-generation Internet. The current Internet is a centralized Internet represented by the HTTP communication protocol. On the centralized Internet, the time and money costs of acquiring, transmitting and storing data are extremely high. We hope to use distributed network infrastructure such as IPFS & Filecoin to build a better next-generation Internet.

As the founder of the company, I have three core requirements for the company. The first is positive energy; the second is continuous innovation; the third is continuous collaboration with partners and effectively safeguarding the interests of partners and customers. Therefore, the values ​​of Spacetime Cloud are integrity, innovation, collaboration, and customer first.

IPFS&Filecoin——Distributed Network Infrastructure

IPFS is a distributed communication protocol in P2P mode. In the P2P network, it can reduce the use of bandwidth resources of the centralized backbone network because its communication and storage are also distributed, which means that distributed storage is more secure.

Filecoin is the incentive layer of IPFS. Without Filecoin, there will be no token, and it will be impossible to incentivize more people to use IPFS. The more people mine Filecoin, the stronger the IPFS network will be. The stronger the IPFS network is, the higher the demand for using the IPFS protocol and Filecoin for storage will be. Then there will be more distributed applications developed on the network. The more people develop, the more storage is needed. When the data stored for Filecoin becomes more and more valuable and the amount of stored data becomes larger, the value of Filecoin will be greater.

Filecoin does have the potential to become the digital gold of the future . People who hold Filecoin tokens are equivalent to shareholders in the web3.0 ecosystem, or "coin owners."

Filecoin's consensus mechanism is proof of space and time. Compared with Bitcoin and Ethereum, it has two major innovations:

• The first major innovation is that Filecoin can form consensus without wasting resources. This is because in the current digital currency market, whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum, consensus is actually formed through a large amount of calculation and waste of energy. Filecoin forms consensus based on the amount of valid data stored. In the Filecoin network, the more valid data you store, the greater your computing power.

  
  

• Another innovation is that Filecoin can provide storage services for the distributed storage ecosystem. In the future, all decentralized and distributed applications can be developed on Filecoin, and Filecoin can store the real and valid data of these applications. In other words, Filecoin can break the dilemma of blockchain that is originally unable to store big data, and provide blockchain with the ability to store big data.

IPFS and Filecoin complement each other. The larger the distributed network is, the stronger its storage capacity will be. The three major elements of the Internet are computing, storage, and network. When IPFS and Filecoin are successfully built, the distributed network will realize the two elements of storage and network. This means that IPFS & Filecoin provides an infrastructure of storage and network for the entire distributed storage ecosystem.

Filecoin is in its best era

Today, this era is the era of transformation from the real economy to the digital economy. Why do I say that? Let me give you a specific example. The emergence of Taobao has led to the deterioration of the business of many physical industries, but the rent is getting higher and higher, and the income of physical stores is getting lower and lower. In the field of blockchain, there are more opportunities for high returns.

The current IPFS & Filecoin is likely to be the foundation of the distributed decentralized ecosystem. When we have IPFS & Filecoin, our future digital economic world may be truly realized. In the future, there may be various killer applications.

Globally, consensus on public chains, especially consensus on underlying public chains, has slowly begun to take shape. Blockchain is undergoing a transformation from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. Bitcoin, represented by 1.0, is the earliest blockchain technology, with a main distributed accounting function. 2.0, represented by Ethereum, implements smart contracts and provides the function of issuing coins.

The times are changing rapidly, and blockchain 3.0 will definitely be more long-term and feasible than 1.0 and 2.0, and even the implementation of blockchain applications. Then, this is likely to be an opportunity for IPFS & Filecoin, because in a distributed ecosystem, distributed applications can use IPFS and Filecoin for storage and network communication, which is what we talked about before, IPFS & Filecoin can help blockchain land .

Where are the opportunities for distributed storage in China? At the national level, alliance chain technology is more likely to be accepted in China. Now Spacetime Cloud Technology has also been exposed to a large number of demands from governments and listed companies, because distributed storage combined with blockchain technology can solve the problem of large file and big data ownership, and build a trusted large file storage network.

Therefore, based on distributed storage, both the government and large enterprises will have a large demand, so it is very likely that alliance chains will appear. The emergence of alliance chains means that the problem of information islands between institutions may be solved, thereby forming a sharing of data and files. The underlying data storage of these alliance chains is likely to rely on distributed storage.

Blockchain is a world where computing power is king. In the Filecoin network, more than 95% of the computing power is now output by Chinese miners. Filecoin belongs to every participant, evangelist, and engineer in the community, and its community trend is inevitable. After the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, it is very likely that the Chinese community, Chinese engineers, and Chinese technical teams will begin to provide technical support for Filecoin. The future development direction of Filecoin will most likely be formulated and completed by us Chinese. Let's wait and see.

Factors affecting Filecoin mining

First of all, the hardware solution is a foundation, and different hardware compositions will also have a very large impact on mining output revenue.

For example, using Intel hardware in the early days was definitely a failure, because Intel's chips and solutions were not compatible with the SHA256 algorithm. This would result in miners being unable to mine successfully or having very low mining efficiency, even if your algorithm was good, because the hardware foundation was not good enough. However, using AMD is compatible with the SHA256 algorithm.

Although Spacetime Cloud was established only three years ago , the core team of Spacetime Cloud Technology has been engaged in the storage industry for 12 years, and previously provided storage technology solutions to ZTE and China Telecom's Tianyi Cloud. After we paid attention to the IPFS protocol in 2016, we began to modify the IPFS source code. Since the launch of the Filecoin development test network, we have been deeply studying the core algorithm of Filecoin, including our own reconstruction technology for the mining algorithm. Therefore, in terms of Filecoin mining technology, we still have many leading technologies.

Why do some small miners always have low effective computing power? It is because the technology of their entire cluster and the entire file system architecture are not well designed, that is, they do not have the technical accumulation of the storage industry, or they use the official version of the open source storage system architecture. However, many open source technical solutions have bugs and the risk of problems is very high. Every line of code in the Spacetime Cloud file system is written by ourselves, after several years of accumulation, and the security is verified.

For Filecoin, long-term safe and stable operation and maintenance is actually very important. Without this safe and stable operation and maintenance technology, no matter how high the computing power is, it may be lost, and then the Filecoin you staked may be punished.

Regarding the FPGA solution, we made a related announcement at the Mars Finance Summit in Shanghai more than a month ago. At present, Spacetime Cloud should be the first to release an FPGA solution ahead of all its peers. The overall performance of the external FPGA technology has also reached our expectations. We look forward to a greater improvement in the future.

If the algorithm for Filecoin mining is fixed, then with the foundation of chip technology such as FPGA, we may develop ASIC chips in the future. If the ASIC solution is successful, the performance of Filecoin mining will be greatly improved in the future. For example, the demand for CPU may decrease, and the demand for graphics cards may decrease, thereby reducing costs.

Many people are paying attention to when Filecoin's mainnet will be launched. I personally think it will be launched after the National Day. Although the current reward test network is in good condition, the environment for testing the network is not good enough, so I think it is reasonable to postpone it for a short period of time to prepare.

Filecoin belongs to the community

Regarding Filecoin's economic model. In fact, the entire parameter design of Filecoin was unreasonable at the beginning. According to the earliest economic model, if we follow the scale of our computing power, we may have to borrow 500,000 to buy or borrow coins for collateral in a day. Later, many large miners communicated with the official. After discussion, the economic model was also adjusted, but the 20-day pledge of this model is still a headache, and many large miners are constantly communicating with the official. In the early morning of this morning, the coefficient of Filecoin's economic model was adjusted again, and the 20-day freeze period was cancelled. In general, the official has made a relatively large compromise in today's economic model, and this once again proves that Filecoin belongs to the community and we must believe in the power of the community.

In addition, everyone is currently paying attention to the mortgage coins. Although Filecoin needs some mortgage coins to start mining in the early stage, you don’t need to worry about pre-staking. Because our Spacetime Cloud also has reward coins in the space race, including overseas. We also have layouts, and these reward coins will be provided to everyone for free to start mining.

Will Filecoin be forked after the mainnet is launched? I think it is possible. I have seen several groups of people want to fork Filecoin, but I think the opinions of the top miners are still the most important. I think the big miners will actually support the development of the Filecoin main chain. So, will there be a side chain in the future? In fact, I think it doesn’t matter whether Filecoin will be forked or not. What matters is that everything is developing in a better direction, promoting the progress of the Internet and human civilization.

Space race, space-time cloud moves forward steadily

Now the storage scale of the entire Filecoin Space Race network is close to 150PiB, so the Space Race has initially had a testing environment for large miners. In the previous tests, Spacetime Cloud has always been far ahead and has firmly ranked first in the computing power of the entire network. Spacetime Cloud is also the world's first truly 5PB-level large miner. It can be said that Spacetime Cloud has set a Filecoin milestone on the test network, because in the history of Filecoin testing, the first node to reach 5PB is Spacetime Cloud.

In order to verify the geographical location of miners and better test Filecoin in this space race, Filecoin needs to have an order retrieval function. However, the robot is located in Europe, which makes it difficult for many miners to receive orders, especially for some large miners.

In addition, due to the need to verify geographic location information, IP addresses are public, and they are inevitably subject to DDOS attacks. Of course, this has little impact on the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, because the essence of Filecoin is a distributed network. After the mainnet is launched, robots no longer exist, there will be no public IP operations, and the miners' IPs are not displayed, which means that after the mainnet is launched, the possibility of hackers attacking miners is greatly reduced.

A truly good ecosystem must be mutually beneficial and win-win, rather than suppressing opponents through malicious attacks. In fact, the act of attacking itself reflects the low level of a person's vision. Investors who choose companies that do evil are tantamount to seeking the skin of a tiger. Spacetime Cloud has always focused on researching mining and improving mining efficiency, rather than spending energy on studying how to attack others.

Today, the computing power of Spacetime Cloud nodes is steadily increasing, and the computing power growth rate ranks first in the entire network, with a single-day effective computing power growth rate of 1.4PB. In addition, we have also done a good job in security protection. Spacetime Cloud is currently and will continue to upgrade its defense technology and increase its technical and financial investment in security defense.