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Recently, IPFS and Filecoin have become hot words in the industry. In addition to discussing the prospects for technological development, most people are also concerned about how much wealth Filecoin can bring after it goes online. Therefore, the issue of grabbing the "first mine" has also been widely mentioned.
IPFS is called the next generation Internet protocol. It is advertised that its goal is to supplement (or even replace) the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that currently dominates the Internet.
As we all know, the Internet is built on the HTTP protocol. The HTTP protocol is a great invention that allows our Internet to develop rapidly. However, as the Internet develops today, HTTP has gradually shown its shortcomings, such as: HTTP centralization is inefficient and costly; Web files are often deleted; centralization limits the growth of the web; Internet applications are highly dependent on the backbone network. The goal of IPFS is not only to accelerate the web. It is to eventually replace the HTTP protocol and make the Internet better.
IPFS stands for Inter-Planetary File System. It is a global, peer-to-peer distributed version file system. The principle is to replace domain-based addresses with content-based addresses, that is, users are not looking for a certain address but content stored somewhere. There is no need to verify the identity of the sender, but only the hash of the content. This can make web pages faster, safer, more robust and more durable.
This was not the case in 2017 when blockchain or cryptocurrency was very popular. At that time, few people knew and understood the IPFS protocol. The reason why it was not popular at that time was probably that a complete blockchain solution was not required to obtain financing and be listed on exchanges, so no one had the time to seriously study what kind of technical architecture blockchain needed to solve what problems in what scenarios. Naturally, few people could reach the IPFS protocol.
From a technical perspective, IPFS is an extremely powerful file distribution protocol, but good technology does not mean a good product. Users share their idle hard drives to distribute files, which is completely voluntary and there is no economic model to motivate them.
At this time, Filecoin appeared. Filecoin and IPFS are complementary. Both were created by the same company, Protocol Labs, and their founders are Juan Benet. IPFS allows participants in the network to store, request, and transfer verifiable data to each other. Using IPFS, each node can store the data they think is important. Before the emergence of Filecoin, IPFS had no way to incentivize others to join its network or store specific data. In order to solve this key problem, Filecoin appeared. Under Filecoin's incentive structure, customers pay to store data at a specific level of redundancy and availability, and miners are rewarded by continuously storing data and cryptographically proving the data storage.
In short: IPFS addresses content and makes it move, and Filecoin is the missing incentive mechanism.
The basic process of mining can be simply described as follows: a user uploads a file, the file is divided into several fragments, and then the miners have to grab the fragments of the file and put them into their own hard drives in order to get Filecoin.
The similarities and differences between the two can be understood in this way. The differences between IPFS and Filecoin are:
IPFS: Internet Transfer Protocol, similar to HTTP. Function: data location and distribution. No traditional blockchain technology is used.
Filecoin: A complete and innovative blockchain technology that innovates the concept of "computing power", cleverly reuses data from the computing power formation process to reach consensus, and avoids the large amount of energy and computing resource consumption brought by PoW.
The technology stacks of the two are very different. Except for the underlying transmission protocol, almost everything else is different.
IPFS and Filecoin related points:
Technically, IPFS and Filecoin use the libp2p module as the underlying protocol. Filecoin can also be considered an application of IPFS technology.
IPFS and Filecoin are a pair of complementary protocols that together form the next generation of Internet protocols.
IPFS technology has huge development space and commercial potential, and Filecoin blockchain application projects based on IPFS are also highly concerned. At present, as the main network is about to be launched, it has attracted a lot of attention.
People who are optimistic about the Filecoin project generally believe that once the mainnet is launched, due to the need for collateral, the coins that participated in the private placement in the early stage will need to be gradually released after half a year, which will result in not too many coins circulating in the market in the first half of the year or even a year. The optimistic expectation of the coin price will lead to everyone hoarding coins, which will cause the coin price of Filecoin to maintain an optimistic trend in the initial period of time.
Based on the optimistic expectations of the coin price, people from all walks of life are competing to participate in the "first mine". The first mine refers to the coins mined after the Filecoin mainnet is launched, especially in the first six months. The coins mined in the early stage are relatively more, and it is relatively cost-effective to sell the coins mined at this time.
Therefore, most of the people in the industry are currently attracted to Filecoin mining machine and mine investment. But it is worth mentioning that Li Yandong, chairman of Interstellar Continent, pointed out at the Interstellar Hitchhiker's Guide - IPFS Technology and Application Seminar Forum that the closer to the launch, I think the growth of mining machines will slow down, because most people can no longer catch up with the first mines, and the number of venture capital close to the launch may decrease. I predict that most mining machine companies may not have an ideal input-output ratio at present, so after the launch, the number of customers of these companies will not increase, and the number of mining machines in the entire market will not have an explosive growth, but the top manufacturers with a good input-output ratio will continue to grow. |
