"Coin Chat Filecoin" The halving of Bitcoin has sounded the horn, can Filecoin create another wave?

At 19:30 on the evening of May 12, Chu Chu, founder of Lanben Finance, talked with Anne, head of BiYong International Edition, and Eason, CMO of 1475: The halving of Bitcoin has sounded the horn, can Filecoin set off another wave?

Let’s review the live broadcast content together.

The three most noteworthy things in 2020 are Bitcoin halving, the launch of Filecoin and Ethereum 2.0. We are currently in the Bitcoin halving stage. What do you think about this?

As for Bitcoin halving, it has been a hot topic of concern and discussion among Bitcoin consensus holders since the second half of last year. Each halving in history has brought huge benefits, so miners including Bitcoin holders are very much looking forward to the benefits of Bitcoin halving. Bitcoin halving does not mean a halving of the total amount, but a halving of the output. Previously, each block rewarded 25BTC, and now the block reward is 12.5BTC, which is actually good for the market. Speaking of IPFS Filecoin, I believe that this project is not unfamiliar to people in the entire circle. This project has been in existence for more than two years since I learned about it in 2018. When I first came into contact with this project, I thought it was very powerful and worth looking forward to. It was a project that would subvert the HTTP protocol. In the storage market, storage is a rigid demand, which is inevitable. After the advent of 5G, the demand for data storage will be even greater, and distributed storage can be safer and faster in the storage field.

In my opinion, Bitcoin halving is just an event. Of course, according to the historical trajectory, it is entirely possible to trigger a "butterfly effect". Looking back, Bitcoin began to fall on March 6, from a low of around $8,000 to around $3,800, a drop of about 55%. Later, due to an oversold rebound, the price was maintained at around $8,500, and even exceeded $10,000, with a rebound of nearly 80%. As the leader of the cryptocurrency industry, Bitcoin and other mainstream currencies also entered the upward channel with it. The rebound of most mainstream currencies was weak and not as good as Bitcoin. Bitcoin completed the price correction before the halving, which undoubtedly brought some optimism to the market after the halving. From the perspective of miners, this halving will cause some miners who have not completed the upgrade of mining machines to "surrender". Of course, the continued rise in the price of coins and the arrival of the Fengshui period will delay the time of surrender and give these miners some breathing space.

In addition, Ethereum 2.0 is a fully planned alternative to Ethereum. According to the schedule, in the next few years, the designers of Ethereum 2.0 will package up the current Ethereum consensus system and blockchain status and add them to Ethereum 2.0.

It is such a huge project that we cannot accurately predict what will be included in Ethereum 2.0 and what will be discarded. According to the information currently available, some teams have already started early development. According to the current plan, the designers of Ethereum 2.0 have added some current advanced technologies, such as sharding technology, Casper protocol, state rent (a mechanism for charging users for storing data) and eWASM, the next generation virtual machine project of Ethereum. The development of the client has also been put on the agenda for a long time. The early development and testing work is proceeding in an orderly manner. A powerful Ethereum 2.0 test network is expected to meet us within three months.

At that time, all the Ether in Ethereum 2.0 will come from the current Ethereum main chain, but the designers plan to change the relationship between the two blockchains through continuous updates and iterations. Ethereum 2.0 will gradually become the main chain, and the current Ethereum 1.X blockchain will become a shard chain managed by it.

Finally, Bitcoin created the entire blockchain from scratch. Filecoin actually enables the entire blockchain to achieve real application implementation. So its value may increase over time in a sense, and it is the only project I have seen that may bring the same influence as Bitcoin in the future. So we believe that in the future, as filecoin continues to improve and more applications will be connected to filecoin, the wealth effect of the entire filecoin will be more obvious and greater.

At the same time as Bitcoin is halving, Filecoin is also preparing for the launch of the second phase. Do you think the Filecoin project will set off a new wave?

There are several hot topics this year, one is the Bitcoin halving, and the other is the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. Coincidentally, the launch of the second phase of Filecoin testing and the Bitcoin halving are at the same time. I think that essentially, whether Filecoin will set off a new wave has nothing to do with the Bitcoin halving. It may be a coincidence, or it may be trying to take advantage of the market. I can’t make a judgment on this.

The core value of Bitcoin is consensus value, and the value of Filecoin is application value. The two are two independent tracks. The emergence of Bitcoin has the concept of distributed decentralization and is recognized as digital gold. Its status is deeply loved by the people. I believe that more than 90% of people who enter the digital field market know Bitcoin, and there are also very few people who enter but do not know digital currency. I have seen an article that many Filecoin investors do not know Bitcoin or digital currency. They invest in Filecoin for the future commercial value. Filecoin is also the most capable project to achieve commercial application. Filecoin is not a new project, but a relatively early project with a very large vision. I learned that this project was actually in early 2018. At that time, the market was indeed very hot, much higher than it is now. Of course, this has a lot to do with the market environment. I remember that the vision of Filecoin at that time was to allow everyone with a PC to participate in the project. Since Filecoin has not been launched, Filecoin has gradually faded in the currency market. Until this year, I found that more and more people are paying attention to this track. Friends in the community often discuss this topic.

I think this is related to several official announcements. I also think it is because the bubble in the currency circle has returned to its essence. The value of blockchain will eventually be reflected in the landing of commercial applications. After more than two years of technical polishing, Filecoin is now speaking out, which shows that the underlying technology has basically been realized. Investors and consensus groups who originally lost faith in Filecoin have regained their confidence. If the underlying technology is indeed realized and solid, it will definitely bring a new wave to the blockchain market in the digital field. Blockchain technology is no longer a concept, but has returned to its real application value. Filecoin will set a benchmark, and people outside the circle and capital will flood into the market in large numbers. That will be the beginning of the spring of the digital field.

What is the difference between Bitcoin mining and Filecoin mining? Bitcoin is a POW mining, which depends on the amount of computing, that is, the stronger your computing power, the higher the computing power and the higher the block rate; Filecoin is different. Although it is also 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 and verified on the chain. 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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

As for now, I personally think that there are several ways to participate in Filecoin. First, investors who participated in private placements and ICOs in the early stage, second, buying mining machines for mining, and third, purchasing 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 details 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 involved. The total fundraising seemed to be 257 million US dollars, and 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, and 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 is not online, 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. There are high and low configurations and hard disk capacities. This is compared with their respective supply chains. Whoever can get low-cost equipment should have higher profits. The third is the 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 the price of the secondary market. I think it all depends on whether the application value of IPFS is truly implemented.

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 packaging process, that is, the speed at which you can achieve effective storage growth. This parameter will directly affect the final block efficiency, not your hard disk capacity.

So before, every 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. It is the speed that can be sealed per hour for every 10,000 yuan invested. Using this parameter to measure the parameters of different manufacturers, we can know what the input-output ratio of different mining machines is.

Today, please allow Teacher Eason to share with you the latest progress of the Filecoin project and the recent plans of the 1475 team!

Okay, finally, I will update you on the latest progress of Filecoin. First, the time for the second test network. As mentioned earlier, it should be the week of May 13th, US time. It will be a few days later. The rewards for the second test network will be launched as scheduled this week. Juan also said in the official forum that the total reward for participating in the secondary test network will be 1 million Fil coins. There will actually be tests in the middle, and there will be important things, which is the 5PB large miner node test. This 5PB does not refer to the hard disk capacity, but to the effective storage that can reach 5PB, so those who can participate in the 5PB large miner are equivalent to the first echelon of the entire sector industry.

There is also the latest economic model, which redefines empty hard disk data, fake order data and valuable data. For different data, the proportion of effective computing power obtained by your storage is also different. It can be seen that the official is actually moving more and more towards the direction of truly valuable data storage. They do not want to make a project for mining for the sake of mining, but a project with real production applications and effective data storage.

Then the official also released a channel where you can get some really valuable data. The official is also constantly looking for, or cooperating with some B-sides, to allow some traditional massive data to be truly transmitted to the Filecoin track. So with this official direction, I believe that after Filecoin goes online, there will be more and more valuable data stored in this network, whether it is B-side or C-side. I also believe that under such development, the value of this project will definitely increase in the future. Mining for ecological value and application value is a sustainable business/career.

Our team has been researching the underlying algorithm since 2018, so we have been constantly iterating around Filecoin, and have also developed our own set of more optimized algorithms that are parallel to the official ones. Then, under this algorithm, we have also developed our own set of software systems to more efficiently implement the entire calculation process. Corresponding to such a set of mining software, we have matched our own set of hardware systems, so the overall solution we have made is to achieve the fastest packaging speed mentioned earlier, that is, to achieve the highest input-output ratio. We will continue to follow this path of technology.