The Force Research | Mining Guide (I): Filecoin Network Construction Logic and the Innovator’s Dilemma

This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone

What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger.

— Nietzsche

Taleb defines "antifragility" in his book "Antifragile" as the characteristics of things that not only benefit from chaos and volatility, but also need such chaos and volatility to survive and prosper. However, after the performance of the space race in the past few days, we can see that small miners are in dire straits, mainly due to: slow growth in computing power and low storage success rate. How to grow "antifragile" has become a problem that needs to be solved urgently.

Although the latest white paper "Creating the Filecoin Economy" released by Filecoin officially mentions a simple casting, it involves a concept - anti-fragility, which is to enable miners to achieve it in the early stage. Because it is likely to be difficult to achieve due to technical and financial reasons, the Force Zone has once again upgraded the global partner program to help miners who are temporarily lagging behind in technical strength, enable the entire network to grow by "200%" in line with the baseline requirements, and jointly shape the scale of distributed storage.

This article will introduce the mining process and the dilemma faced by some miners in the current space race, and explain how we should deal with it?

Preface: Through this round of space race performance, many miners are currently unable to increase their computing power in the early stage, and the success rate of block generation is low, due to reasons such as insufficient computing power, frequent failures of Worker's P1 and P2, lack of miners to assist in winning packaging, lack of storage demand parties to provide orders , and difficulty in generating blocks. From a micro perspective, the miner may not be able to obtain space race rewards, and from a macro perspective, the network is difficult to grow further.

1. Filecoin Overview : Mining, Storage, and Retrieval

With the advent of the new digital era and the rise of China's new infrastructure, many people will ask, what is the contemporary significance of IPFS? What is the focus of Filecoin? What kind of empowerment does Filecoin mining actually participate in?

IPFS is equivalent to an upgraded version of the BT protocol, but it is not limited to the exchange of content storage, but also involves applications in all fields. It can be understood as an international, decentralized, highly secure, and highly confidential new Internet. Its contemporary significance is not limited to the comprehensive upgrade of network infrastructure services, but also gives humanity the pursuit of privacy and freedom.

Filecoin is a value medium that maintains the fairness and order of the IPFS network. It is equivalent to the formulation and supervision of the "laws" of the free economy, and uses economic means to reasonably supervise and sanction every rational economic person. In short, IPFS is the embodiment of the value mapped by Filecoin. IPFS has a greater macro significance, and Filecoin belongs to the value embodiment of the network.

The significance of BTC mining is to maintain and supervise the decentralized ledger, which is the basis for establishing consensus. It adopts the PoW consensus mechanism and forms consensus through proof of work. The overall value of BTC is consensus, thus forming the largest payment token in cryptocurrency.

The essence of Filecoin mining is not only to maintain the ledger, but also to provide storage and retrieval services for basic data. Therefore, Filecoin mining will give more practical value to the network and provide a network architecture for the service.

Filecoin mining overview, source: IPFS Force Zone, 2020-08-28

As can be seen from the above figure, our miners will be involved in three activities when participating in the Filecoin network: block packaging, data storage, and data retrieval, which are introduced as follows:

• Block Packaging (Block Rewards)

Miners generate miner identification by building nodes, creating wallets, applying for faucets, etc., and then use some hardware equipment to support the entire network, complete data encapsulation and time-space proof, thereby obtaining packaging permissions and obtaining block rewards.

• Data storage (on-chain)

After the customer and the storage miner confirm the order, the miner ensures the data service through proof of replication and proof of time and space, thereby obtaining the corresponding storage service fees.

• Data Retrieval (Off-Chain)

After the client issues a retrieval request, the retrieval miner provides retrieval services after receiving the activity order, thereby paying the corresponding retrieval services to the miner.

So how do we become a miner?

2. How to become a miner

Many users do not know how to become a miner. In fact, from the operation point of view, we can also become a qualified miner according to official and online information, but there may be some differences in the benefits, so we need to rely on the power of professional operation and maintenance to get higher benefits. Without further ado, the miner operation guide is as follows:

• Build a Filecoin test node

• Wallet creation and token faucet acquisition

• Configuration operations for storage providers (miners)

• Configuration operations of storage demanders (users)

• Search Market and Search Miners

• How to deploy a multi-node cluster and mining pool design ideas on a single machine

• Proof of Transaction, Proof of Replication, and Proof of Spacetime

1) Build a Filecoin test node

First, we can try to build a Filecoin test node on macOS and Linux servers. The main steps to build a test node are as follows: install the Filecoin installation package, run and check the Filecoin software, name the node, activate the node, and add network statistics.

Install Filecoin

There are two ways to obtain the release installation package. One is to compile it yourself through the source code, and the other is to download the official release installation package. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages .

The advantages of self-compiled release installation packages : the customizable source code compilation process can clearly see the entire Filecoin process from synchronizing data, mining, creating miners, issuing orders to receiving orders; its disadvantages: the compilation preparation process is relatively complicated, requiring strong debugging and operation and maintenance capabilities, and the compilation takes a long time, and requires higher machine CPU performance.

The self-compiled release installation package needs to go through the process of building, installing, and testing the self-compiled package in order to better cater to development. However, in the early stage, it will need to be rebuilt and adjusted as the official version is adjusted. This method is more suitable for teams with strong operation and maintenance capabilities.

Get the official release installation package. Teams with weak operation and maintenance capabilities can use the officially developed version, but the officially released version is more suitable for individual investors. The advantage is that it bypasses the complex and lengthy source code compilation process and can be used directly. The disadvantage is that the latest code package is difficult to keep up with the latest official website adjustments in time, and the real-time performance lags behind.

You can download the latest version of the official release installation package at https://github.com/filecoin-project/go-filecoin/releases.

Official release installation package, from: official website, 2020-08-28

After the installation is complete, you can check the installation status of the Go-filecoin test network, initialize and run the filecoin node, configure the node name (the Filecoin network can configure the node alias), and finally check the visual monitoring of the node and the network, and you can see your node on the global network.

2) Wallet creation and token faucet acquisition

Miners are active participants in promoting the consensus processing of the Filecoin network and are also block proposers of the expected consensus (EC). They can be both miners and storage demanders. Miners need to be online at any time, waiting to accept storage orders from customers, provide storage services, and seal sector data to earn FIL. Not only that, they also need to continuously execute proof of space-time (PoSt) in the process to prove whether they can participate in the block election.

Source: Official website, 2020

3) Build a wallet and get a faucet

Wallet construction

Filecoin wallet is like many blockchain wallets. As a carrier of encrypted assets, it is a part of the blockchain system, usually asymmetric encrypted public and private keys. The wallet address is automatically initialized by the node. The address information is very important and is required for balance query, export and import.

Faucet

FIL Faucet is a token faucet that allows some early Filecoin node users to obtain a certain number of FIL tokens in advance to participate in early market activities. It is only used in the testing phase and has no transfer and equity value. The test FIL tokens are distributed through GitHub accounts. During the space race phase, each account has 100 FIL, mainly for mortgage mining.

After creating the wallet, we also need to distinguish between node ID, account, wallet address, miner ID, and content ID.

Source: IPFS Force Zone, 2019

• The node ID can be a storage client or a miner. The ID is the unique identifier of the node, just like the name of Facebook, which is never repeated;

• The account ID corresponds to the node ID one by one. The account can store multiple wallet addresses, which are mainly directly linked to FIL. The node ID tends to identify attributes, while the account ID tends to asset attributes. The node is automatically initialized and generated.

• The miner ID is mainly related to the miner's income, so after the Filecoin node is deployed, the miner needs to manually create a command to generate the miner ID through the node ID;

• The content ID is linked to the files stored on the network, and each file will generate a unique ID, mainly to facilitate quick indexing of data.

4) Configuration operations of storage providers (miners)

To become a storage miner, you need to accept the rules and EC consensus of the Filecoin storage market before you can engage in mining, because in the blockchain world, code is law.

The storage provider mainly promises to provide storage services. After the order is negotiated and confirmed, the service is proved by replication and time-space proof. The overall cycle can be divided into the following steps:

• Storage transaction proof. Establish identity, submit collateral and storage capacity, and become a storage miner;

• Produce orders . Create blocks, create Ask orders, and trade with user nodes;

• Stop mining. Seal the data and submit the copy proof, update the order status to complete the transaction, and store the time-space proof data continuously;

• Improve the proof of block generation capability. Storage miners continue to collect proofs, create posts, and increase storage computing power and provable computing power to increase the probability of block generation.

Create a Miner ID

After creating a miner identity and obtaining an ID, you also need to promise to provide proof of storage service. However, the test network is different for different groups: for ordinary users, the sector is 256MB, and for developer users, the sector is 1KB. The standards are different for different main groups. The latter saves more time in closing sectors, but there are no mandatory regulations and they are adjusted according to their respective hardware configurations and operation and maintenance levels.

Set up and send Ask order configuration

The storage provider initially sets up an Ask order to start mining rewards and to earn storage order income. In the latter case, the network can freely adjust the price based on the order to match the market.

Ask order configuration issues : The miner worker address is mainly used to complete all external tasks, including participating in Ask orders to submit proofs, sealing data, etc. Workers often migrate and change, and the security level is low; the miner owner address is suitable for cold storage of private keys and has a higher security level; FIL/byte/block is the unit price; the time to generate a block; the FIL fee value required for a single Gas burn; the total Gas limit.

In the early stage, miners need to feed themselves data. This process is mainly to meet the miners' need to reach a certain data volume in the early stage. There are three ways:

• Accepting orders. Currently, orders are automatically accepted at this stage.

• Sealing process, data encapsulation;

• Proof of time and space. After the proof of time and space, it can be continuously proved that the data is stably stored.

After the transaction of the storage order is successful, two important parameters, storage computing power (effective computing power) and provable storage capacity (sector success rate), will be directly linked to the probability of block generation.

Currently, many small-scale miners are stuck at this step, mainly due to four reasons: it is highly difficult to synchronize, it is difficult to match orders, and it is difficult for miners to package.

• Highly difficult to synchronize. Due to technical reasons, many miners are unstable in the P1 and P2 stages during the Sector process, and the failure rate is too high (as shown in the figure below, many failure rates are as high as over 90%), which makes it difficult to achieve data sealing and leads to failure.

• It is difficult to match orders. The main reason is that the current space race stage is different from the test network stage. The test network settlement is automatic order acceptance, while the space race is an optional stage. As a result, small miners may not be able to produce orders, complete the subsequent storage miner steps, obtain the benefits of storage orders, and increase the probability of block explosion.

• Packaging is difficult. For small-scale miners, after completing the windows and winning time-space proofs, no miners will help pack and broadcast the network, resulting in block failure; on the contrary, miners in multiple clusters can assist each other.

• It is difficult to generate blocks. With the growth of computing power and storage scale, especially for miners with more than 1PB, generating blocks requires random access to some sectors in the entire storage, which is a great challenge to response time. Miners who cannot complete data reading within 30 seconds will waste a block generation opportunity, and the corresponding income will be reduced.