Filecoin miners tested high fever, investors were so anxious that they couldn't sleep at night

August 25th is a big day for Filecoin miners.

At 6 o'clock in the morning of that day, the mining machine manufacturers who had been preparing for a long time plunged into the competition, anxiously waiting for their own mining machines to produce beautiful data.

Distributed storage solution providers, existing investment institutions, individual investors who have purchased cloud computing power, and media observing hot topics have all focused on topics such as the effective computing power rankings, the number of staked tokens in the entire network, the total computing power of the entire network, and the average block time.

While the mining machine manufacturers are fighting hard, perhaps the ones who are more anxious than them are the Filecoin mining machine investors standing behind them.

In just a few days, some people became worried after seeing the poor data of the mining machines they purchased, some patiently observed the data to determine their mining machine partners, and some suddenly discovered that they might have bought the so-called "fake mining machines."

It’s time to take out the mining machine you purchased before.

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Filecoin Miners Take on the Challenge

“In the Filecoin mining machine market, the entire market needs data to make transactions.” A partner of a mining machine manufacturer from Hangzhou lamented to Blocklike.

She said: “Let’s not talk about the configuration of the mining machine for now. Most mining machine investors will directly take a screenshot of the data ranking and ask, which one of the top 10 or top 50 is you?”

As of August 27, the statistics of filscout.io are as follows. The list types mainly include effective computing power, number of blocks, and computing power growth rate. This list is the battlefield that all mining machine manufacturers are trying their best to win.

In the field of Filecoin mining machines, the first to be hurt are probably the very early Filecoin mining machine investors from 2017 to 2018.

"When Filcoin launched the configuration required for mining machines in the first half of this year, the batch of mining machines purchased two years ago basically became scrap metal. A group of mining machine vendors made a lot of money, while a group of miners lost everything," an investor from the community told Blocklike. In the early stages, the prevalence of fake mining machines and rampant capital also caused Filecoin to be plagued by negative news.

In February 2019, the Filecoin testnet was launched, and mining machine manufacturers entered the market one after another. However, the official parameters are still subject to change, which makes many investors very cautious when choosing mining machines. In the first half of 2020, the popularity of Filecoin has steadily increased, and a large number of mining machine manufacturers have poured in. With the entry of a large number of participants, many manufacturers have attempted to deceive investors with one-sided information, and there have been cases of false and exaggerated propaganda.

Investors and the market are eager to see real data, so this competition has become a battleground for manufacturers.

So, how should we look at this data?

A technical developer from a Hangzhou mining machine manufacturer told Blocklike: "Simply speaking, Filecoin mining can be divided into two processes: data sealing and consensus proof. The best mining machine is the one that takes less time and has higher efficiency in the data sealing stage. To seal data quickly and in a short time, the mining machine hardware mainly achieves this by expanding the memory. However, the larger the memory, the higher the cost. Software optimization is a test of the manufacturer's technical capabilities. This optimization is mainly aimed at the two stages of Precommit 1 (P1) and Precommit 2 (P2) in the data sealing stage. In general, Filecoin mining efficiency is the result of the combined effect of multiple factors."

"Many companies have been preparing for a long time just to increase their data for marketing and publicity. As far as I know, some leading manufacturers have adopted the method of piling up the number of mining machines, using more than 1,000 mining machines of the company at the same time to grab the "first prize". However, mining machine buyers may not purchase such a large number, and it is not rational to make a choice based on the ranking alone. At the same time, many manufacturers that do not have an advantage in the number of mining machines often optimize the software configuration to reduce the storage time. Mining machines with this kind of thinking often have strong stamina, and the test time must be extended to see that the data can show stable growth."

He also mentioned: "It can be observed that a certain top-ranked brand takes nearly 3 hours in the P1 and P2 stages, which is not very efficient. For another brand, it takes about three and a half hours to seal a block, which is only slightly better than the official stage, and the growth is slower, which is not particularly outstanding."

At the same time, he believes that calculating the effective input-output ratio (G/H/W) is a better measurement method, which means the effective storage capacity generated per hour for every 10,000 RMB invested.

He gave an example of Blocklike: For example, look at the computing power chart below. The curve is relatively smooth, indicating that its computing power growth is stable.

Distributed Capital recently discussed two cost-effectiveness indicators for Filecoin mining machines. It believes that Filecoin mining machines have two cost-effectiveness indicators. The first is the storage index (yuan/T), that is, how much is the price of each terabyte of disk. The second is the computing power index (Gb/h/w), that is, how many GB of data can be stored per hour for every 10,000 yuan of the purchased mining machine. The storage index and the computing power index are a pair of contradictory indicators and are somewhat confusing. Usually when the computing power index is good, the storage index is relatively poor. Therefore, mining machine manufacturers generally only publish one of the indicators of the mining machine.

After several official extensions by Filecoin, these data are of great significance to investors who have purchased mining machines or cloud computing power. How to extract truly effective information from a large amount of data and information is also their focus.

An institutional investor confessed to Blocklike: “When I knew we were going to test it, I was so anxious that I couldn’t sleep at night. I just wanted the data to come out as soon as possible so I could see the data.”

Investor perspective

In the first half of the year, the amount of investment in Filecoin in the industry was undoubtedly huge.

Just two months ago, the industry's star project Filecoin was all the rage and became one of the few areas where large amounts of capital flowed in during the first half of 2020.

How popular is it?

At the Hangzhou Blockchain Week held at the end of July, according to incomplete statistics, there were about 200-300 mining machine vendors participating. During that week, activities themed on distributed storage accounted for 70-80% of all the approximately 40 offline activities.

Since the investment logic of distributed storage is clear and the concept is easy to understand, both traditional investors and people in the industry can easily understand and accept it. In the absence of hot spots at the time, various institutions have entered one after another. From the development of the Filecoin industry chain, we can see that Filecoin has formed a complete closed-loop ecosystem, including upstream capital, mining machine manufacturers, project parties, middle-level user groups, developers, and ecological participants, and downstream media, transactions, consulting and other links.

According to Feixiaohao data, as of August 27, Fil's year-to-date increase has reached 596.12%.

However, recently, Filecoin, known as the "king of pigeons", has been delaying the launch of its mainnet, and the market has shifted its attention. This has caused large investors and investment institutions to re-examine the risks of Filecoin's delayed launch. According to Blocklike, some investment institutions have even prepared a response plan in advance if Filecoin still cannot be launched by the end of 2020.

However, the more optimistic thing is that many institutions are still optimistic about this field. Huang Haiguang, founder of Muwu Capital, believes: "At present, different groups still have different views on the IPFS market. We have also listened to many schools of thought in the past few months. From the perspective of capital, I think the distributed storage track is fine, and we will also pay attention to multiple targets in this track. From the perspective of the technical team, the distributed storage business has now become the core business and cash flow pillar of the technical team. Having lower costs under the premise of the same production capacity level is what I personally care about."