"Filecoin Talk" Can filecoin achieve the goal of 100 billion? When is the best entry point?

1. It is said that Filecoin is a 100 billion-level project. Can Filecoin achieve this 100 billion-level goal? What do you think about this?

Yan Yun:

I personally think that it is still a long way to go for Filecoin to achieve its idealized goal of hundreds of billions of yuan. I don’t think it can reach such a height in the short term. But there are many things to look forward to. I have talked about distributed storage before. I personally think it is a rigid demand in the future. With the advent of 5G, the demand for data storage will be even greater. Distributed storage is particularly important, especially in terms of data security. There is no doubt that there are security risks in the storage of traditional data in the centralized storage market. In terms of data security, it is the focus of any enterprise, and it is even a fatal blow. If the threshold of distributed storage is not too higher than that of centralized storage, then this transition period will be shortened a lot, and it is very likely to reach or even exceed this level.

Eason:

First, let’s look at the 40 trillion new infrastructure, which mainly includes seven major areas: 5G base station construction, ultra-high voltage, intercity high-speed railways and urban rail transit, new energy vehicle charging piles, big data centers, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet. It involves many industrial chains and is guided by the new development concept, driven by technological innovation, based on information networks, and oriented to the needs of high-quality development. It provides an infrastructure system that provides services such as digital transformation, intelligent upgrades, and integrated innovation.

The new infrastructure is essentially the infrastructure for the digitization of information, which poses massive, diverse and real-time challenges to data storage, making data storage a rigid need.

Take 5G as an example. If we compare 5G to a pipe through which water flows, if the pipe is made ten or a hundred times thicker, the storage (analogous to a water pool) must have sufficient capacity to receive it. We predict that by 2025, the amount of newly created data in the world will reach 175ZB; enterprises will have an increasing demand for real-time data processing, and by 2023, real-time data will account for 24.5% of the global data circle.

The Filecoin project is a very important part of the future development of blockchain. It is also a decentralized storage project. With the advent of 5G and the explosion of data, as long as it occupies a part of this industry, it can achieve a goal of hundreds of billions. It is also very likely to be one of the earliest distributed storage projects in the blockchain industry.

2. The Filecoin mainnet is about to be launched, and many people are still waiting and watching. Can you two analyze from different angles what is the best time to enter the Filecoin project?

Yan Yun:

Venture capital is definitely about maximizing profits, but it also maximizes risks. This depends on the individual and should be done in moderation. Don’t be a blind gambler. I won’t say too much about asset allocation here. For the Filecoin project, the group of people who participated in the ICO early on waited for three years and finally got some official news, one is the second phase of testing, and the other is the mainnet launch expectation. This undoubtedly brings hope to early investors.

If it goes online on schedule and the market price is good, the returns for early investors will definitely be considerable, but I personally think it is not the best time because we have been waiting for 3 years. Let’s talk about Filecoin secondary market investment. The investment risk in the secondary market is relatively small, but the profit is also much smaller. Of course, this is closely related to the development of the project’s application ecology. Filecoin realizes the value of storage applications and is widely used, and long-term investment is also a good choice.

I personally still think it is more appropriate to participate at this stage, for the following reasons:

First, the official first-phase test of Filecoin has been completed, and the second-phase test is planned to start. At the same time, the official also took out millions of files from the foundation as test rewards. I think this behavior should be the official process entering the final stage. It is very likely that the official is doing the final test.

Second, the official has provided one million files as testing rewards for the second phase of testing . This behavior can be understood as the second phase of testing can already generate revenue.

Third, the mainnet is about to be launched, and the data from the second phase of testing will be of great reference significance. Investing again at that time will cause the Bitcoin S9 to be hyped up to 20,000-30,000 yuan that year , which is too costly. Based on the above views, I personally think that this period of time is a good time to enter the market, which not only avoids the long wait of early investment, but also skips the problem of high cost investment caused by tight supply chain demand in the future.

This view only represents personal opinions on entering Filecoin and does not constitute any investment advice.

Eason:

Here is a famous saying: The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago or now.

First of all, let's look at the official Gantt chart. At this stage, we are in an interoperable network. The official has also implemented lotus and go-filecoin on the same chain. Lotus and go-filecoin have reached a consensus, and the implementations of fuhon and forest will also be prepared for interoperability. At present, the network is relatively stable, the official is continuing to develop, and code submissions are not as frequent as before.

From the perspective of development progress, the implementation of the block synchronization mechanism of Lotus is basically consistent with the official development progress. The design of the block reward of Interopnet has been completed, the economic model has been basically determined, and the parameters of the economic model will be adjusted when it reaches the main network.

From the official development progress, the design of block synchronization is basically consistent with the implementation of lotus. The multi-signature wallet solution has been determined, and the wallet solution is still being designed and improved. The mortgage mechanism and penalty mechanism solutions have also basically come out, and several difficult points in the underlying technical architecture of Filecoin have basically been solved.

3. What are the ways to participate in the Filecoin project? What points should be paid attention to in the layout? Can you give some suggestions on this?

Yan Yun:

As for the current ways to participate in Filecoin, I personally think there are the following points: first, investors who participated in private placements and ICOs in the early stage, second, buying mining machines for mining, and third, buying in the secondary market. First, let me briefly talk about the group of investors who participated in private placements and ICOs in the early stage. I don’t know much about the IPFS private placement price and unlocking cycle, so I won’t go into detail here. But I still know something about the ICO wave of people, because this project was too hot at the time, and there were a lot of people participating. At that time, the total fundraising seemed to be 257 million US dollars, and the ICO unlocking was divided into 6-36 parts, with an average cost of about 5 US dollars. I don’t know much about this, and I hope our guests will share with us later. Let's talk about mining. The word mining is very familiar to everyone in the circle. It is the same as Bitcoin mining, but the mining principle is different. The market for Bitcoin mining machines or Ethereum mining machines is basically transparent, but Filecoin is a little different. First, the main network has not been launched, and no one has data to prove that their mining machines are better than others. Second, the Filecoin mining machines I know are actually not much different from the machines in the IDC computer room. They have different configurations and hard disk capacities. This is a matter of their respective supply chains. Whoever can get low-cost equipment should have higher profits. The third is companies that focus on IPFS and Filecoin track technology. They will specialize in the optimization of Filecoin's underlying encryption algorithm. In this regard, I think it will be more convincing if professionals answer. I will just throw out some ideas here, and then talk about secondary market investment. There are many factors that affect secondary market prices. I think it ultimately depends on whether the application value of IPFS is truly implemented.

Eason:

In fact, Filecoin's mining machines have been on sale since 2017, and many mining machines have been sold on the market. However, as the code continues to improve, everyone can see that the earliest home mining machines can no longer participate in mining, and some of the later servers are not compatible with GPUs, and may not be able to continue to participate.

Therefore, for investors, it is very important to choose someone with a technical background who can study the underlying code of filecoin for a long time , who can understand the future changes and trends of the filecoin code and make some hardware predictions in advance.

Another point is that for those who don’t know much about filecoin, everyone may now evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the machine based on how much it costs per terabyte, but this is actually a very serious conceptual error. As mentioned earlier, the mining efficiency of filecoin depends on its effective storage, not on its hard disk capacity. The price per terabyte we calculated just now actually refers to its hard disk capacity. The effective storage that determines the mining efficiency depends on the speed of your entire encryption algorithm process, so it is not just the hard disk capacity, but a large part depends on your computing power, so it is a very comprehensive process.

Therefore, we now recommend many investors to pay attention to a parameter, which is the sealing speed per hour for every 10,000 yuan invested . Sealing is a process of sector packaging, that is, the speed at which effective storage growth can be achieved. This parameter will directly affect the final block efficiency, not your hard drive capacity.

So before, each company may have sold a lot of mining machines through their own publicity or channels. But I think now that it is about to go online, everyone must pay attention to the input-output ratio. That is, the speed at which the seal can be made per hour for every 10,000 yuan invested. By using this parameter to measure the parameters of different manufacturers, we can know what the input-output ratio of different mining machines is.

4. Filecoin has been in beta for three weeks. Judging from the popularity of the beta, it is not an exaggeration to call Filecoin the gold of the new century. Do you think Filecoin deserves this title? (What is the potential of Filecoin)

Yan Yun:

As a decentralized on-chain wallet, Bitkeep uses the popularity of the project as an important criterion for us to measure whether to connect to the main network. As far as the current market popularity of Filecoin is concerned, it has far exceeded our expectations. Whether it is the feedback from users in the Bitkeep community or the keyword hot searches on media platforms, or the endless activities, IPFS and File coin are inevitable. In terms of popularity, it has surpassed 99% of the projects in the circle. To be frank, the current popularity of File coin is second only to BTC and ETH. For Bitkeep, we will definitely support the File coin main network as soon as possible for such a high-profile project. In fact, Bitkeep has already supported the test network of File coin and is now negotiating with the File coin official to become the recommended wallet for the File coin main network. Back to the host's question, I cannot give a clear answer to whether File coin deserves the title of the gold of the new century. BTC is called digital gold because of its emergence with the concept of blockchain, and it is called digital gold because of consensus. I don’t have a deep understanding of File coin, but I also know that File coin, known as the representative of Web3.0, is the most capable of realizing the commercial application of blockchain. Therefore, File coin is consensus + application. If the title given by the market can be truly implemented, I personally think it is not an exaggeration to be called the gold of the new century.

Eason:

When it comes to digital currency gold, we have to mention BTC . First of all, we need to understand what is the difference between Bitcoin mining and Filecoin mining? Bitcoin is a POW mining, which depends on the amount of calculation, that is, the stronger your computing power, the higher the computing power and the higher the block rate; Filecoin is different. Although it is related to effective storage capacity in the end, how to define and obtain its effective storage capacity? In fact, you need to obtain storage orders and encrypt these data multiple times. After encryption, a string of hashes is generated to the chain for verification. Only those that are authenticated on the chain are called effective storage capacity, also called effective computing power. This is real data. First there is data, then there is an order, and then after completing an encryption algorithm, effective computing power is finally obtained.

After obtaining effective computing power, it is the same as Bitcoin. The more effective computing power you have, the higher your block generation rate, and the more rewards you get. Another thing is that the main income of Bitcoin comes from block rewards and transaction fees. But Filecoin's rewards will be divided into several parts, one is also the block reward for mining; another is storage orders, you help others store things, you will get some storage income; another part is retrieval income, that is, if you help others to retrieve a file in the entire network in the future, you can also get retrieval income, so the scope of income will be more than Bitcoin.

From another perspective, Bitcoin is based on consensus mining, and Filecoin is also based on consensus mining. Of course, the consensus behind it is based on the realization of commercial value. So in the long run, Filecoin may have additional value in the real application end. Of course, I believe that Bitcoin may be more like gold in digital currency. Through everyone's consensus, it eventually becomes a value storage. Filecoin will have more application attributes. Who will eventually become a greater value carrier will be left to future verification.

5. File coin officials clearly stated in the live broadcast on May 29 that the mainnet will be launched as scheduled, and also announced the economic model. Could you please give a brief interpretation?

Yan Yun:

These are two questions. As a non-professional, I really don't have much to say about the economic model. I only know that there is a mortgage mechanism, so I won't show off in front of professionals. I'll leave it to Eason to answer for us, and I'll learn from him. As for whether the mainnet will be launched as scheduled, I think it still depends on File coin officials. I think the purpose of File coin launching two rounds of testing is to ensure that the mainnet can be launched safely and stably. Although many voices in the market say that File coin has missed the deadline, I personally can understand File coin officials very much. After all, delaying or postponing the launch to solve the security and stability of the chain is always better than rushing to launch and causing various security instabilities and bugs. If this phenomenon really occurs, there will be more extreme voices in the market. The second test has been launched for some time, and there are no problems with the underlying layer of the chain itself, and no major bugs have appeared. File coin also clearly stated in the live broadcast that the mainnet will be launched as scheduled, indicating that File coin officials have great confidence in the launch, and at most they should make some optimizations in the algorithm, so I personally am very optimistic and look forward to File coin being launched as scheduled.

Eason:

At present, the economic structure is divided into several major parts. The first part is also the one that everyone pays the most attention to or has the largest weight, that is, the block reward, which is closely related to the income of each miner .

The second part is the mortgage mechanism. Of course, this will also freeze some of the coins we have mined and balance the circulation, which will also be related to us.

The third point that the official raised is actually very important, which is about the encapsulated sector or the storage quality of the data you store. In other words, for truly valuable data in the future, the official does not want to mine for the sake of mining, but really needs to complete the storage cycle of this data before exiting. Therefore, he also considers the quality of the entire stored data.

The last piece is a reward for searching the market.

Key points: 4 modules of the economic model : block rewards, mortgage mechanism, block quality (penalty mechanism), and retrieval mechanism

In fact, I still admire the authorities very much, because no matter from their underlying code foundation or from the entire economic model, they really expect the entire network to undertake the future distributed decentralized storage, because many people in the market are constantly hoping that they will go online as soon as possible. But the primary goal of the authorities is still security and stability. Then in the longer term, they have been considering how to store real data, rather than mining for the sake of mining . It may be because of their long-term adherence to their ideals that they have attracted so many people to pay attention to this project. It may be said that more and more people will participate in it in one or two years, because the real application and storage landing is its real value.

So let me share with you what we are going to do next. Regarding mining , we are also communicating with some B-ends with relatively large data traffic in the United States and the authorities, hoping to create some real B-end, B to C data storage, in order to graft it into the network. So we have been paying close attention to when the real effective data can be stored, or where the effective data is, and we are building such a bridge.

So it is in line with official expectations. We hope that in the future, one thing we can do is to improve storage efficiency, and the second is to store valid data, so that we can obtain a higher power value, that is, effective computing power, and truly obtain more mining benefits.