Exclusive Interpretation | I heard that Filecoin’s official hard drive mining has a 10x computing power bonus? The new test network has a million-dollar reward?

This article is mainly for the 6block community, and provides a comprehensive interpretation of Filecoin’s recently released official hard disk and the launch of Testnet Phase 2. For more details, please see the video at the end of the article. The following is a transcript:

Filecoin officially launched the Filecoin Discover project on May 7th. Its original intention was to allow miners to store more useful data in the system, such as the data of Berkeley's unmanned driving. According to the official introduction, they will store valuable and public data in hard disks for sale , and the storage capacity of these hard disks will be higher than that of ordinary hard disks. Currently, the official support is 8T hard disks, and it may support 16T hard disks in the future.

So why not just transfer the data over the Internet? The official explanation is that Internet transfer speed is too slow and the cost is too high, and mailing the hard drive is the fastest way. However, selling the hard drive will face many problems, such as later repairs, customs clearance, tariffs, and the sensitivity of the stored data. So I personally think there will be many problems and risks involved.

We have mentioned before that Filecoin's economic model introduces two new concepts, called verified users and verified data, because the authorities do not want to store useless data in the system, but want to authorize some users through a decentralized autonomous organization. These verified users will have the need to store valuable data, and their data is called verified data. The authorities will give these users some incentives to ensure that more meaningful data can be stored on the network.

Filecoin officially has two computing powers, namely original value computing power and effective computing power. For verified data, the effective computing power will be added with a weighted coefficient. At present, the official has not yet determined the specific value, but in the code given earlier, we can get a glimpse of it. As can be seen from the figure below, the basic coefficient is 10. If the data is matched and delivered through the Filecoin network, the coefficient is 11. If it is verified data, it is 100. So the computing power brought by verified data is 10 times that brought by random data. If you buy an official 8T hard drive, then the effect it brings is equivalent to the computing power brought by an 80T hard drive. What does this mean? Although the weighted coefficient has not been announced yet, it can be said that there will be an order of magnitude more.

Let's look at the selling price of hard drives. Overall, the selling price of hard drives is still within a reasonable range. Generally, an 8T hard drive on the market costs around $215. Filecoin has increased the price by about $50, which is acceptable to a certain extent.

The data in the purchased hard disk still needs to be packaged and computing power is provided to turn the data into packaged data. Someone asked if the packaging operation can be performed in advance? The answer is no, because the entire packaging process must include the miner's personal information. If the main network is not online and there is no miner ID, the packaging operation cannot be performed. In addition, the validity period of the hard disk data entrusted to the user for storage is one year. The computing power bonus can be obtained within one year after the main network is launched, but the official has not given a clear statement on the situation after one year.

Testnet phase 2 is a preview before the launch of Filecoin mainnet. The code at this stage will not be changed much from the actual launch. In addition, the coins mined on Testnet Phase 2 cannot be mapped to the mainnet, but the official will prepare a reward of one million for miners who participate in the test. The test will mainly measure the miners' ability to store and transfer data, such as the total amount of storage, storage transaction volume, bandwidth of data services, latency, etc. This series of tests will be conducted in the second and third weeks of June, and the specific tests will be announced in mid-May. Miners will have ample time to prepare before then.

For medium-sized miners like 6block, it is enough to show their strength appropriately at present, in case the official makes further changes in the future. The main thing is to help the official provide some peripheral tools and find some bugs, such as 6Block assisted the Trapdoor team in discovering serious vulnerabilities in Filecoin PoREP . For large miners, it is time to show some strength now, to provide more storage, to support the network scale, and to let the official see the system running smoothly under large-scale storage.

Okay, that’s all for today’s sharing, thank you everyone!