Author: Xiaobie 8 Questions
On the evening of June 16, Babbitt's "8 Questions on Major Events" held a special live broadcast on Filecoin, inviting two guests, Xie Dapao, the initiator of the Filecoin.cn Chinese community, and Will, the co-founder of Interstellar Vision , to discuss topics related to Filecoin mining.
Filecoin is a distributed storage network based on the IPFS protocol, which ensures distributed data storage without being restricted by centralized Internet companies. Since its launch in 2017, it has received widespread attention from the market. On June 10, Filecoin officials said that they would start testnet rewards before the mainnet goes online, and its mainnet is expected to go online in August this year. How to become a Filecoin miner? How to choose a mining machine? What are the things to pay attention to when mining Filecoin? In this live broadcast, "8 Questions on Big Events" will give you a full guide to "avoiding pitfalls in Filecoin mining"!
In Xie Dapao's opinion, there are three reasons why Filecoin has become a recent market hotspot . First, after the Bitcoin halving, funds have to find the next direction; second, Filecoin's technical concept is deeply rooted in people's hearts, that is, it surpasses HTTP; third, Filecoin is expected to achieve real application landing and realize decentralized storage. Will agrees with this. He believes that in the short term, because the Filecoin mainnet has not yet been launched and its ecology has just started, there is a certain bubble. Before the ecological application is rich, the actual value of Filecoin will be overestimated.
The Filecoin mining machine market is like a black box , hiding many secrets and darkness. Will said that the Filecoin mining machine market is very chaotic. From 2018 to 2019, hundreds of mining machine manufacturers entered the market. After several delays, some people were out and some were in.
He observed that the reasons are, firstly, most mining machine manufacturers lack technical strength and are only engaged in marketing, such as holding meetings in third- and fourth-tier cities to attract ignorant groups such as grandpa and aunt; secondly, Filecoin's story is more down-to-earth, and its actual commercial use can be compared with Alibaba Cloud. The vision is that the IPFS protocol is directly comparable to the current Internet protocol HTTP, which can continuously attract people who want to make quick money.
Talking about the risk control of Filecoin mining, Xie Dapao said that since the technical principles of Filecoin are relatively complicated, you can ask your friends who understand technology to explain it from a technical perspective rather than an investment perspective, so as to improve your ability to identify projects. As for personal investment, he believes that different people have different investment preferences, some are conservative, and some are aggressive. Filecoin is more of a technical investment, and you need to communicate more with professionals to have a clear mind.
1
How to avoid pitfalls in Filecoin mining?
Jia Xiaobie: The Filecoin project became popular in 2017 due to the amount of funds raised. It became popular from 2018 to 2019 due to the large number of Filecoin mining machine manufacturers. Why is it still so popular in 2020?
Xie Dapao: The fundraising for the Filecoin project started in August 2017. At that time, there were not many ICO projects, so Filecoin stood out. In 2018, as the threshold for mining was lowered, some mining machine manufacturers began to hype the concept of Filecoin/IPFS, which led to a lot of chaos. I think there are three reasons for the popularity this year. First, after the Bitcoin halving, funds have to find the next direction; second, Filecoin's technical concept is deeply rooted in people's hearts, that is, it surpasses HTTP; third, Filecoin is expected to achieve real application landing and realize decentralized storage.
Will: Filecoin is a star project with a grand vision. It was launched to solve the problem of data storage by targeting HTTP. In 2017, it ranked third in IC0, which also ensured its survival in the past two years. In the short term, because the Filecoin mainnet has not yet been launched and its ecosystem has just started, there is a certain bubble. Before the IPFS ecosystem is rich in applications, the real practical value of Filecoin may be overestimated.
Jia Xiaobie: What is the difference between Filecoin mining and Bitcoin mining?
Xie Dapao: Filecoin mining is very different from Bitcoin mining. For example, traditional Bitcoin mining does not require collateral, and the machine can be mined as soon as it is turned on. The prerequisite for Filecoin mining is to have collateral coins in hand to pledge your storage space.
Filecoin brings benefits to honest miners through block rewards and service charges. At the same time, it also encourages miners to provide high-quality services through pledge and penalty mechanisms. It has three ways of income: storage income (providing storage space), retrieval income (providing retrieval services, bandwidth), and block rewards (packaging blocks).
Filecoin mining is affected by many external environmental factors, such as the network conditions of the mining farm. If the network speed is too low, it will completely affect the mechanism of participating in the competition for blocks. In addition, unstable voltage can easily cause damage to the mining machine disk, unstable voltage can cause damage to the power supply, and may also cause damage to the motherboard.
Bitcoin mining uses Asic chips, because Bitcoin actually performs the same hash collision in a loop. However, Filecoin mining is more complicated, as it first processes a large amount of data, and all of it is serial. Each operation depends on the previous link and cannot be performed in parallel, so Asic chips are difficult to implement.
Jia Xiaobie: In 2019, the Snail Miner, which claimed to be able to mine fil, was investigated by the police. This market is like a black box, very chaotic. What factors caused it?
Will: Yes, the Filecoin mining machine market is still very chaotic, and it is likely to continue until the mainnet is launched. There are many reasons for the chaos.
First, most mining machine manufacturers lack technical strength and invest most of their energy into marketing, such as expanding the market in third- and fourth-tier cities and attracting groups such as grandpas and women. In serious cases, scams can easily occur.
Second, Filecoin’s story is more down-to-earth and can be compared to Alibaba Cloud, and IPFS and HTTP, which has attracted a group of people who want to make quick money.
Third, the mainnet launch date has been postponed several times, and the market enthusiasm has never cooled down, causing the entire market to be in a state of chaos.
Jia Xiaobie: What pitfalls did you encounter when buying Filecoin mining machines?
Will: First of all, there is no such thing as a real or fake mining machine. The only difference is whether or not FIL can be mined and how much it can be mined. I personally also tried to invest in mining machines in early 2018, and now it seems that it basically cannot mine FIL.
In 2019, people started to make industrial mining machines. There are a large number of second-hand mining machines on the market. Their hardware scalability is poor and they cannot adapt to the current network. It is now difficult to mine FIL after testing.
The other is a market issue. For example, in the early days, many manufacturers claimed that one machine could mine multiple items, and that while mining FIL, one could also participate in other mining income. Anyone who understands the principles of Filecoin mining should know that Filecoin mining is packaged within a specified time and requires continuous submission of PoSt verification at a fixed period. The mining machine has no spare capacity to do other work.
2
How to choose a Filecoin miner?
Jia Xiaobie: In the past three years, what are the obvious changes in the quantity, iteration and price of domestic Filecoin mining machines?
Will: In the past two years, both IPFS and Filecoin have undergone great changes and progress. In 2018, although there was only a white paper and vision, a lot of mining machines were sold, and most of them were NAS machines and home versions priced under 10,000 yuan.
On February 14, 2019, Filecoin was officially open sourced, and Filecoin became a hot topic again. Industrial-grade server mining machines appeared on the market on a large scale, and the prices of mining machines also exceeded 10,000 yuan, with most of them ranging from 20,000 to 60,000 yuan.
On December 12, 2019, the Filecoin test network Lotus was launched, and the market became hot again; until May of this year, we saw that Filecoin's underlying technology was constantly being consolidated, and with the different depths of optimization of each company, the price of mining machines has exceeded 100,000.
Jia Xiaobie: As far as you know, how many mining machine manufacturers are there in the market that can actually mine Fil?
Will: The Filecoin mainnet is not online yet, and the FIL mined on the testnet is only the testnet's results, which are all open and transparent on the chain. From current observations, many miners should be able to mine FIL after the mainnet is launched, but there may be about 10%-20% of the top mining machine manufacturers in the market that can continuously and efficiently mine a high proportion of FIL in the entire network.
Xie Dapao: This is a game of funds. After the mainnet is launched, how many companies will be able to show their machines? Some big players are hiding their strength and have not yet shown their muscles. After the mainnet is launched, the big players will squeeze everyone out at once.
Jia Xiaobie: Judging from the hardware configuration required by the current mainnet, what hardware and software does an ordinary Filecoin mining machine need to be equipped with at least? With these hardware and software configurations, what is the hard cost of a Filecoin mining machine?
Cannon Xie: AMD high-frequency CPU, mainly to meet SHA acceleration, especially the pre_seal_commit_1 stage; 128GB or more of memory; a system disk of 480GB or more, preferably with fast read and write speed; a graphics card with at least 8GB of video memory.
3
How to do venture capital well?
Jia Xiaobie: How to control risks when investing in mining machine manufacturers for Fil?
Xie Dapao: Since the technical principles of Filecoin are relatively complex, you can ask your friends who are familiar with technology to explain it from a technical perspective, rather than an investment perspective, so that you can improve your ability to identify projects. As for personal investment, different people have different investment preferences, some are conservative, and some are aggressive. Filecoin is more of a technical investment, so you need to communicate more with professionals so that you can have a clear understanding of it.
Will: Investing in blockchain projects is a high-risk investment. First, you should continue to learn, improve your cognition, think independently and make decisions during the investment process. In addition, when contacting manufacturers, listen carefully to the marketing content and grasp the essential risk control and rate of return of investment. Second, read more real-time data from Filecoin official and on the chain, and follow up on data changes frequently. Third, the ranking of the test does not represent everything but is a very important reference factor. Data cannot be obtained by luck. Technology is accumulated bit by bit, so it can be reflected in the ranking.
Jia Xiaobie: When is the best time to buy a Filecoin mining machine?
Xie Dapao: The purchase time has a regular cycle, from order placement, production to transportation and listing. After ordinary users place orders and reach a certain quantity, manufacturers will start mass production. Depending on the production capacity, some manufacturers can ship within 7 days, while others may take half a month or a month. Another thing is transportation. For example, it may take 3-4 days from Shenzhen to Inner Mongolia, and then there is listing. Users should choose the time to buy Filecoin mining machines based on the entire supply chain process.
Will: I would like to say two things. First, the time to enter the market is better than before. Filecoin's underlying algorithm has become stable. After testing and bug fixes, it has begun preparations for the launch of the main network. The configuration of the mining machine will be finalized. Second, the official test reward plan of 4 million tokens released last week is a good time to participate in mining at this stage.
Jia Xiaobie: What impact will this 4 million reward plan have? What preparations do participating miners need to make?
Will: I think this is a very positive signal, allowing everyone to participate in Filecoin mining in advance and gain benefits. Miners must be fully prepared, such as choosing which area to deploy mining machines, what method to adopt, etc. However, the risks and market competition of different choices must be fully considered, especially the competition among Chinese miners will be very fierce.
Xie Dapao: If miners want to participate, they should choose differentiated competition. At present, there are many Chinese players. If a capital giant emerges, small miners will have to consider moving to another battlefield. They should carefully consider their own resource situation.
