From the bottom of the contempt chain to the "C position", Filecoin and small mining coins are the most popular ones in 20 years | Chengdu Mining Observation Notes (VII)

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Sichuan ushers in "Mining Week" and mining forces gather in Sichuan. Babbitt reporters rush to the front line to bring the most front-line reports from the industry and compile a series of articles called "Chengdu Mining Observation Notes" to describe for you this thrilling change in the mining industry that is taking place.

This is the seventh article in the series.

On June 1, Children's Day, the 2020 Chengdu Digital Mining Summit of Wahbi.com kicked off. Every guest at the conference received a Children's Day gift from Wahbi.com - a decompression carrot.

At the Mining Network conference, including the previous World Mining Conference and TokenInsight Mining Summit, many guests expressed that they talked about two things when they met: the first was where to eat and the second was how to get involved in Filecoin mining.

I talked to many people about IPFS mining, and they looked at me with suspicion and seriously pointed out: This is wrong!

IPFS has nothing to do with blockchain. Its function is data transmission and location, which is similar to BT protocol. Filecion is a distributed storage project based entirely on blockchain, an application built on IPFS, which uses token incentives to improve IPFS network nodes. IPFS+Filecoin constitutes a complete world of data transmission + storage. Therefore, the correct term is Filecoin mining.

Today, let’s talk about new mining opportunities in 2020 - Filecoin mining and small mining coins.

▲Zhang Yuan, co-founder of Wabi.com, presided over the opening ceremony

"Magical" Filecoin mining, from the edge to the center in 2020

Regarding Filecoin, I deeply feel that there are too many people on this ship and too much money invested, so that everyone has to run blindly and go all the way to the end.

I won’t go into details about Filecoin’s great and legendary mission. I will tell you about what I heard at the mining conference held by Wabi.com in Chengdu.

About the fantastic price.

Filecoin has a total of 2 billion FIL tokens, 70% of which are produced by mining, and 30% are distributed in different proportions to private investors, foundations and protocol laboratories, the latter of which have different lock-up periods.

Currently, Filecoin mainnet is not online, but futures have appeared on multiple exchanges. For example, the price on Gate.io is 86 RMB. In Chengdu, I heard some ecosystem participants speculate on the price of FIL:

1. The conservative estimate is 100 yuan per coin, and the ideal estimate is 100,000 yuan per coin.

2. Rank in the top ten after the mainnet launch, and in the top five within two years. It is not ruled out that the mainnet will be ranked in the top three within the first three months after the launch.

Does anyone believe that 100,000 yuan per coin? Some middle-aged women may really believe it. The butt determines the head. I see that the participants in the Filecoin ecosystem have great ambitions for FIL.

In the first year of FIL, not counting the coins unlocked in the Genesis block, there were 153 million coins released through mining alone. If calculated at 1,000 yuan, the circulating market value is at least 20 billion US dollars, currently ranking third. If calculated at 100 yuan, it would be 2 billion, ranking tenth.

A friend who participated in the private placement with a cost of 12 yuan told me that the market value of 86 yuan was already crazy. "It's all imagination, it's magical." He strongly advised me not to touch futures.

I think everyone has witnessed the madness and popularity of Filecoin. In the past few years, nearly 500 Filecoin mining machine manufacturers have emerged across the country, and the cumulative investment cost of miners may exceed 50 billion.

Today, I see that almost the entire industry is hyping Filecoin, and I also see many people investing huge sums of money to make money from this unique project. But I have to say that, except for the mining machine manufacturers, I haven't seen anyone really make money.

I even found that even today, the Filecoin project is full of uncertainties.

For example, the second test of the Filecoin test network has been stopped, and the official website is fixing bugs. According to the Protocol Lab, the main network will be launched in July-August. However, some guests at the scene said that they can just listen to it and cannot be sure.

For example, some specific parameters of Filecoin’s token economic model have not been determined, the consensus algorithm may be changed after the mainnet is launched, and the official has not yet given recommended parameters for mining machines.

Let’s put it this way. If you buy a Filecoin mining machine today, it is still unknown whether this mining machine can mine blocks when the mainnet is launched. It is very likely that nothing will be mined. In fact, most of those who bought Filecoin mining machines in the past have already lost money.

Even so, risky funds are still pouring in. So much so that some mining machine manufacturers say that the machines they can produce for customers currently only have 90% fixed parts, such as chassis, motherboards, power supplies, fans, hard drives, etc. They produce and stock up in advance. When the official algorithm is fixed and the official releases the final hardware configuration table, they will configure these things into the machine, so that they can let customers mine the first mine as soon as possible.

A guest kindly reminded me that he thought it was not appropriate to buy mining machines at the moment and that everything had to wait until the mainnet was launched.

To this day, I still feel strange and magical about Filecoin's mining machine ecosystem. But the words of 1475 co-founder Tian Qicheng are still worth thinking about. He said: "The mainnet launch may burst the bubble. This bubble was pushed by many mining machine manufacturers, but this is a bubble at the mining machine level, not the Filecoin project. I think this project is valuable in the long run."

It has to be said that capital is smart. Since so much money has poured into Filecoin, there must be some kind of opportunity to make money. The popularity of Filecoin in 2020 is worth paying attention to.

With the arrival of funds, the spring of small mining coins has come

The popularity of Filecoin is not only due to the story of the project itself, but also the overall rise of small mining coins in 2020.

Why are small mining coins so popular? I learned from the mining website conference that it is to some extent due to the crowding-out effect of Bitcoin.

On the one hand, the endless mining arms race and the halving of mining output have made it increasingly difficult to make money from Bitcoin mining. The centralization, specialization, and refinement of the mining industry are the general trend, which has kicked out most small and medium-sized miners.

On the other hand, the market has become numb to the stories of mainstream coins, and small mining coins with their own characteristics have become a breeding ground for new stories.

Wherever capital and people go, there is spring. Grin, CKB, and Beam gradually came into the spotlight. This led to a surge in demand for GPU mining machines, and also brought back FPGA mining machines that had disappeared for seven or eight years.

In Niubi, this small mining coin vertical website will post new small mining coin airdrop advertisements every few days, which is simply dazzling. Some of them really have skyrocketed in market value within just a few months, while more of them quickly disappeared.

In the mining circle, miners are used to buying new coins. If a small mining coin is profitable, GPU computing power will flock to it, the computing power of the mining coin will skyrocket, miners will collectively sell their coins, the price will plummet, and the computing power will scatter.

Pan Shi, founder of HashPool mining pool, told Babbitt that miners attach great importance to the speed of listing coins in the mining pool, because the earlier the investment, the higher the return. HashPool can complete the listing of a new coin in 3-4 days.

Pan Shi suggested that when miners are mining small coins, they can exchange part of the coins for Bitcoin in the early stage to lock in the profits, and hoard part of them and wait for the currency to explode.

▲Pan Shi was interviewed by Babbitt and other media

There are actually very few small mining coins that have really entered the public eye, such as Grin and CKB. Once small mining coins grow up, FPGA and Asic mining machines will take over the computing power, and graphics card miners will exit.

Many small mining coins may only have a life cycle of two months from birth to death, because these small mining coins have no community at all. And more small mining coins are completely pyramid schemes, with only the name of POW. As the saying goes, there are not enough leeks. The magic of some small mining coins is really the same as IPFS, and they are comparable.

However, I still believe that diversity is the real blockchain world, and those who can survive the test of time may be the future of the industry.

In the past two years, when Asic mining machines and Bitcoin mining were all the rage, Ethereum mining was at the bottom of the contempt chain, not to mention small coins. Today, whether it is small mining coins, or the rise of GPU mining machines and FPGA mining machines, they have added more possibilities to the monotonous world of cryptocurrency. Just like biological evolution, only the fittest can survive.

"The static income of S19 may have exceeded 600 days, but the mining machine of the new graphics card is only more than 400 days. Graphics cards have completely outperformed Bitcoin. It seems that for the first time in many years, graphics card miners can stand up straight. Although you Bitcoin miners have money, our income is high and we are very stable." Zhang Li, founder of Shenlang Mining Machine, joked.

He further believes that the graphics card market is a decreasing market, and the computing power will not grow that fast. In addition, the technology iteration speed of graphics cards is very slow, and the update and replacement of graphics card mining machines will not be very fast. Because it will take a long time for Ethereum to smoothly transition to POS, Zhang Li also believes that the graphics card mining market will have a long time to wait for the emergence of a new large-scale POW currency.

So, although small mining coins have magical elements, they are still worth looking forward to. Ten years ago, Bitcoin was also a small mining coin.