Before buying a Filecoin mining machine, you need to know these five common sense!

In the previous two articles, DeepChain has deeply analyzed the characteristics and minefields of Filecoin futures and cloud computing power investment for readers. However, for the majority of investors, what you may want to know more is the inside story and traps in the field of Filecoin mining machines.

From the earlier Snail Interstellar fake mining machine incident to the upcoming launch of the Filecoin mainnet, the price of mining machines has continued to rise.

In fact, the pitfalls in Filecoin mining machines are no less than those in FIL futures and cloud computing power.

In order to let readers have a deeper understanding of Filecoin investment, DeepChain has launched a special column "Through the Mist of Filecoin Investment". We hope to work with everyone to understand the rules of the game of Filecoin investment, seize opportunities and avoid pitfalls.

This article is the third article in this special topic: Filecoin whole machine article.

There are many types of Filecoin mining machines, and this article will help you understand Filecoin mining machines!

1. The hardware is actually similar, the key is to look at the matching scheme

The components of a Filecoin mining machine include CPU, GPU (graphics card), motherboard, hard disk, and memory, which is equivalent to a high-performance computer. Generally speaking, everyone can configure the hardware by themselves and assemble a Filecoin mining machine.

However, as the launch time of Filecoin mainnet approaches, major mining nodes and the mining machine manufacturers behind them have begun to make efforts.

In addition to seizing territory, mining machine manufacturers have also launched an "arms race" in the hardware field again and again, and directly raised the threshold for Filecoin mining.

Individual combat and low-performance machines can no longer adapt to the intense pace, so many people choose to directly purchase finished mining machines from manufacturers.

The above are the product parameters of some of the more common Filecoin mining machine manufacturers on the market.

Among them, the performance of the CPU determines the growth rate of the mining machine's computing power. The more powerful the CPU, the faster the mining machine's computing power grows.

The GPU is responsible for generating proof of space and time in Filecoin mining.

In addition, in the process of Filecoin mining, since its mining is essentially hard disk mining, the larger the capacity of the hard disk, the greater the mining potential and capacity.

As can be seen from the above figure, the gap between the mining machine products of major manufacturers is not that large.

This is because, since the beginning of this year, Filecoin has continuously announced the ideal parameters of Filecoin mining machine accessories, such as determining the SDR algorithm, supporting 1080 and 2080 series GPUs, and launching official hard drives, etc. This has also led major miners to become closer in the hardware configuration of mining machines, and the only difference is that they have their own characteristics in the mining pool operation plan.

Therefore, in principle, if the effective storage growth rate and hard disk space are the same, the coins mined by different mining pools will be roughly the same, and even if there is an error, it will not be very large.

Industry insiders put the gap at around 10%, but this is only limited to the top few mining companies.

However, for users, it is not enough to only understand the hardware parameters of the Filecoin mining machine, because what really determines whether you can make money is not the hardware, but the writing efficiency of a single T.

2. Don’t just look at the price, also look at the write efficiency

Filecoin is a blockchain for storage. Miners must go through a specific process called Precommit and Commit to write data submitted by clients.

Among these, some algorithms, such as SDR and zk-SNARK, require computing resources.

These computing resources are provided by CPU and GPU. Since the CPU and GPU of machines of major mining companies are different, their writing speeds are also different.

For example, for an 8T hard drive, it takes one day for miner A to write data, while miner B may need three days. In this case, the mining efficiency of miner A is three times that of miner B.

In addition, suppose that the effective storage of mining machine A is 2T, and the effective storage of mining machine B is also 2T. However, the maximum effective storage of mining machine B was 5T, but due to technical failure or other factors, it was reduced to only 2T. Then, despite this, it will still be more efficient than a mining machine with only 2T.

Therefore, what users need to consider is how to select a mining machine through its configuration, so as to maximize the performance of the entire machine and write the most data in the shortest time.

The more data written per unit time, the faster the effective storage capacity grows. The faster the effective storage capacity grows, the higher the storage capacity ratio can be. Under the Filecoin expected consensus, the higher the storage capacity ratio, the higher the probability of getting block rewards in theory.

3. Buying a mining machine requires scheduling, and reselling a mining machine requires taking into account the confidentiality agreement

In addition to fully understanding the hardware and parameters of the mining machine, there are a few pieces of knowledge you need to know before purchasing a mining machine.

First of all, unlike cloud computing power, mining machine owners can sell their mining machines after a period of time to recover funds.

Currently, many miners provide users with mining machine services for 1 to 2 years. However, in DeepChain’s communication with mining machine users, it was found that a considerable number of users’ interest in Filecoin is concentrated in the first six months after the mainnet is launched.

The main reason is that miners are currently competing for Filecoin’s “first mine” reward, and when the “first mine” is gone, some miners are likely to no longer devote their energy to mining.

Therefore, many people will sell second-hand mining machines half a year to a year after the mainnet goes online. This is also the biggest difference between buying mining machines and buying cloud computing power.

But it is worth noting that many miners will sign a confidentiality agreement with users during the process of selling mining machines, which lasts for at least 1 year. That is to say, within 1 year of purchasing the mining machines, users still cannot freely sell their mining machines.

In addition, the current mining machine solutions on the market require users to access the entire mining pool ecosystem to perform mining work normally. This means that a single mining machine cannot perform mining operations independently, and it is hard to say how much such a machine can be sold for in the future, but it is likely that it will not be very valuable.

Secondly, the publicity effect of mining machines is often discounted in practice.

Through communication between DeepChain and industry insiders, we learned that the data parameters of various mining machines we see on the market are often different from the results in the actual operation process. To put it more bluntly, they cannot meet expectations.

On the one hand, some of the parameters publicized by miners are independently tested under ideal conditions. However, when connected to the entire cluster, the mining environment often cannot bring out the full effectiveness of the mining machine.

On the other hand, in some mining pools on the market, the mining machine models are not completely consistent. In order to make all mining machines work synchronously, it is often necessary to unify the mining machine startup standards.

Just like the currently popular new energy vehicles, many new energy vehicles claim that they can run 500 kilometers on a full charge, but in the actual operating environment, considering factors such as road conditions, load, temperature, etc., their actual maximum mileage is often around 390 kilometers.

The same is true for Filecoin miners.

Finally, the entire mining machine cannot be shipped immediately after purchase and often requires scheduling.

Since all Filecoin mining machines are inseparable from AMD processors, a competitive relationship for AMD orders has in fact formed for major mining machine manufacturers.

Several industry insiders told DeepChain that due to the sharp increase in user orders, AMD chips can hardly fully meet the supply demand for mining machines.

For large orderers, the mining machines they purchased often take 20 days to one month to be redeemed after the order is placed, while for retail orders, the delay is 45 days or even two months.

4. Getting a mining machine does not mean you can mine

Unlike the single-machine stacking cluster method of the Bitcoin mining pool, Filecoin mining requires a large amount of data processing, and a single machine cannot quickly complete actions such as data addition, writing, proof, and message chaining, which will result in very low mining efficiency.

Therefore, large Filecoin miners will basically adopt heterogeneous clusters or even more complex cluster solutions, break down the mining steps, use different equipment to perform different tasks, and optimize every link from hardware configuration to algorithm as much as possible.

Although cluster mining requires a lot of extra overhead for internal coordination, and intranet data transmission may also cause bottlenecks, the computing power accumulates quickly and can at least quickly reach the official block computing power threshold.

In a clustered system, there are different roles such as Storage, Miner, Worker, etc., and none of these roles can be missing.

During the Filecoin mining process, the storage server, which is an ordinary mining machine, is used for data storage, while the supercomputing server is responsible for data compression.

The Filecoin mining steps can be simply divided into two steps: Miner and Worker.

Miner is responsible for establishing tasks, publishing tasks and receiving the sector results after Worker processing. After the results are submitted to the chain for verification, they become effective computing power, that is, storage contribution. Effective storage is directly related to the block generation rate of Filecoin.

The Worker is responsible for encrypting and writing the initial sector transmitted by the Miner, and then sending it back to the Miner after completion.

Workers are responsible for calculations, which involve performing mathematical calculations on the original data using the SDR algorithm, and then writing the calculated data to the hard disk sector and submitting it to the chain to generate a copy certificate. After completion, it is sent back to the Miner.

Finally, the written data will be stored on the Storage.

In short, Miner is responsible for receiving data, Worker is responsible for writing data, and Storage is responsible for storing data.

In a certain mining company's plan, the mining machine that the user buys only performs the function of a Worker. When the user's mining machine is connected to the mining pool, the official will be responsible for the functions of the graphics card cluster, Storage and Miner.

In addition, most mining companies, such as Spacetime Cloud, offer a set of mining machines that perform the duties of both Miner and Worker.

But overall, no matter which method is used, it is difficult for users to mine on their own without the mining pool of the miner. On the one hand, some mining machines cannot mine on their own after leaving the mining pool. On the other hand, after most mining machines leave the mining pool, the strength of a single mining machine is difficult to compete with the large mining pool.

5.Why are the prices of mining machines with similar hardware so different?

Currently on the market, the price of Filecoin mining machines is composed of two parts, one is hardware and the other is software.

If we only look at the cost of hard disks or other hardware, it may not be that high. Just like mobile phones or computers, they are also worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, but this includes not only the cost of the hardware, but also the cost of years of research and development.

What's more, the technical threshold for Filecoin mining is very high, which requires professional hardware equipment, software, operation and maintenance services, etc.

Industry insiders once provided a piece of data that hardware only accounts for 30% of the total price of a mining machine. What really determines the price of a mining machine is the software technology of major mining companies, which accounts for 70% of the total price.

After all, Filecoin mining software is to some extent similar to a SaaS cloud system, and the investment in developing such a system software is not cheap.

For this reason, during the second-hand resale process of Filecoin mining machines, miners often agree with users on a confidentiality period of 1 to 2 years to prevent their software technology from being made public too early.

The above reasons are also one of the reasons why the prices of mining machines vary greatly among different mining companies. After all, software technology is the core of a company, which is why some unranked companies sell their mining machines at a low price.

In addition, the difference in supporting services is also a factor that affects the price of mining machines.

Generally speaking, a ranking and powerful miner will provide users with three years of free software and hardware upgrades and replacement services. In addition, the company will pay for the staked coins of customers participating in the first mine, while some miners do not pay much attention to supporting services in their plans.

If you still decide to buy a mining machine after reading this, it means that you are very clear about Filecoin mining machines and are very rich. After all, the Filecoin mining industry, like traditional ASIC mining, has become a game for big players. The threshold for many miners to sell to the outside world starts at one million, and the Xianhe system has even bluntly stated that it does not do business with retail investors, and the threshold for cooperation starts at 3 million yuan.

As an ordinary retail investor, purchasing cloud computing power may be a better choice than buying a complete mining machine.

But no matter what, whether you are a retail investor or a big investor, if you want to not miss out on Filecoin, you have your own way. But before entering the market, you still have to think carefully, keep your eyes open, and carefully identify.