As the Filecoin Space Race enters its third week, the effective computing power of the entire network has reached 139PiB. Filecoin official mosh announced in the Slack channel that the Space Race will conduct a series of important tests this week to test the response speed of miners to sudden events such as errors and network upgrades. Filecoin founder Juan Benet also said on Slack that he was very satisfied with the current progress of the space race and that this week would be the most critical week in the space race. Space Race is the last test version before the mainnet launch . After the successful completion of the Space Race, Filecoin 's code will be frozen, and the mainnet launch has entered the final countdown stage. In the early days of the space race, the test nodes of Spacetime Cloud were maliciously attacked by hackers, resulting in the loss of computing power and disrupting the rhythm. However, after hard work by colleagues in the technical department, the computing power of the two nodes "t02770" and "t02775" of Spacetime Cloud has basically returned to normal. The current computing power growth rate ranks first in the entire network. The total effective computing power of the two nodes has exceeded 7.5PB, and has entered the top five in the entire network. In the final week of the ultimate challenge, we will continue to work hard and strive to be at the forefront. Do the Filecoin Space Race and mainnet require fixed IP? For the mainnet, miners will need a public IP address, which must be accessible but does not need to be fixed. How big of a deal did the robots try to make with the miners during the space race? There is no fixed rule, it can range from a few kilobytes to a full 32GiB sector. What if a miner accidentally loses a sector? If the miner loses the data itself, then the hashrate will be cut if the data cannot be recovered. However, if the data itself is recoverable, then after recovery, the miner can regain the sector. How to evaluate miners’ ability to store and retrieve real data? In the space race, when a miner demonstrates their storage capabilities, many robots will begin trying to trade storage and retrieval with the miner. The competition dashboard will display the miner's transaction success rate in near real time. Miners below a certain high threshold will not be eligible for rewards. Do I still need to seal the committed capacity sectors before promoting them to sectors of actual data? Currently, yes, but the plan is to make it cheaper and more economically attractive after the mainnet launch without the need to reseal data. How to turn committed capacity sectors into “real data”? Miners will publish storage deals that upgrade along with committed capacity, announcing on-chain that they are upgrading and proving to the chain that the new sectors have been sealed correctly, making it cheaper and more attractive to store real data over time as the mainnet goes online and develops.
During the Space Race phase, miners had to execute the entire life cycle of sectors and terminate them. How should we understand what “termination” means? After a committed capacity sector is added to the chain, it can be upgraded to a sector with transactions, extend its lifespan, or terminated by failure or voluntary action. While officials expect miners to execute the entire sector lifecycle to get good news from clients providing long-term storage data on Filecoin , it is reasonable for miners to terminate their commitment to the network and its clients during the space race, which lasts only three weeks. What is the minimum duration of a storage contract between a miner and a client? The minimum duration of a transaction is set by the miners. There is also a practical limit, as sectors have a minimum duration (currently one month). Is the algorithm used in Space Race the same as that used in Mainnet? SDR has been confirmed to be available for mainnet launch. Before the mainnet is launched, the official will not make any changes to the algorithm. What the official does is just fix bugs, improve performance, and improve through new APIs and documentation. The proof upgrade of the algorithm will be carried out after the mainnet is launched, and will arrive and coexist with the SDR algorithm. NSE is one of the best solutions for proof upgrade, and the team is working on it. However, there are other candidates, and it may be another algorithm that is better than NSE, but it has not yet been fully determined. In addition, AMD is likely to be the best hardware for SDR algorithms. Because Filecoin's proof of replication (PoRep) tends to run on AMD processors, more precisely, it runs much slower on Intel CPUs; it is highly competitive on some ARM processors (such as those in newer Samsung phones), but they lack the RAM to seal larger sectors. The reason why AMD processors have an advantage is mainly because they implement SHA hardware instructions.Will the existence of large Filecoin mining pools make Filecoin centralized? Filecoin creates a decentralized storage network to some extent by greatly reducing the entry barriers to becoming a storage provider. Even though there are some large mining pools, people only need to buy a small amount of hardware to join Filecoin as a storage provider, so Filecoin is still a decentralized network that everyone can participate in. What will happen to existing content on IPFS after Filecoin launches?
IPFS will continue to exist and be enhanced by Filecoin nodes. There are many use cases that do not require economic incentives. Think of it as IPFS being HTTP and Filecoin being a storage cloud like S3 – only a subset of IPFS content will live there. People with unused storage space who want to receive monetary rewards should pledge that storage to Filecoin, and clients who want to guarantee storage space should store this data with Filecoin miners. How fast is retrieval from the Filecoin network compared to IPFS? If you are retrieving data from IPFS or a remote pinning layer such as FPS, retrieval should take on the order of milliseconds to seconds in the worst case. Our latest tests retrieving from the Filecoin network directly show that sealed sectors holding data take about 1 hour to unseal. Our best estimate in the real world is 1-5 hours from sector unsealing to final delivery of data. If you need to retrieve data faster for your application, we recommend building on Powergate or FPS. What is the pricing for Filecoin storage? Since Filecoin is a free market, prices will be determined by multiple variables related to the supply and demand of storage, making them difficult to predict before launch. However, some design elements of the network help support cheap storage, especially in the early days. In addition to the income from valid storage transactions, storage miners also receive block rewards, and the expected value of winning a given block reward is proportional to the amount of storage they have on the network. These block rewards are highly weighted in the early stages of the network (the frequency of block rewards decreases exponentially over time). Storage Miners are incentivized to lower their storage fees in order to win more transactions, which will increase their expected block rewards - this is especially true in the early stages. Additionally, Filecoin introduces a concept called “Verified Clients” where clients can be verified to actually store useful data. Storage miners who store data from verified clients can also increase their expected block rewards. Anyone running an IPFS pinning service powered by Filecoin should qualify as a “Verified Client”. We haven’t completed the verification process yet, but we expect it to be lightweight (e.g. submitting a Github profile). Will storing data on Filecoin be cheaper than other centralized cloud services? Filecoin creates a competitive market for data storage - there will be many miners on the network offering many prices, rather than one fixed price. We hope that Filecoin's permissionless model and low barriers to entry will lead to some very efficient operations and low-priced storage, but there is no way to know for sure what the exact price will be until the network is functioning properly.After the mainnet is launched, what are the main development areas of Filecoin? Filecoin is a protocol that enables a truly trustless decentralized storage network. These features include cryptographic storage proofs, cryptoeconomic mechanisms, and public blockchains to solve the challenges of creating a truly trustless decentralized storage network. On top of the core Filecoin protocol, there are many “layer 2 solutions” (many of which integrate IPFS) that enable a variety of use cases and applications, these solutions include Powergate, Textile Hub, etc. Using these solutions, any use case that can be built on top of IPFS can also be built on top of Filecoin. After the mainnet launch, the main areas of development expected for Filecoin are: Filecoin will serve as a developer platform and ecosystem for other developer tools and layer 2 solutions IPFS applications that rely on decentralized storage solutions and also require decentralized data persistence solutions About financial tools and services on Filecoin, such as wallets, signature libraries, etc. An application designed to provide users with publicly verifiable cryptographic proofs of trustless and timestamped storage guarantees for Filecoin
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