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A few days ago, BlockBeats summarized several phenomenal projects that appeared in the first half of this year. One of them is a project called MASS that focuses on the PoC concept. In fact, PoC is not the hottest concept this year, because an X factor is the top project Filecoin. Although PoC and Filecoin are not the same in concept, the biggest common point between the two is the hard disk. PoC talks about mining with hard disks, while Filecoin talks about hard disk storage. If nothing unexpected happens, this top project that raised $200 million three years ago will be launched on the mainnet this year, and PoC may also benefit. Filecoin has been very active this year. Although the mainnet is still delayed, the testnet has given long-awaited investors hope. On May 11, the second phase of testing is about to begin. And just yesterday, Filecoin launched a brand called Filecoin Discover. Under this brand, Filecoin launched a hard drive. The question that this action brings up is, will the emergence of this official hard drive affect the business of other IPFS mining machine manufacturers on the market? Chaos in the IPFS mining machine market Searching for "IPFS mining machine" on Baidu, the homepage shows people selling mining machines and those who bought mining machines seeking redress. This top project has attracted too many people's attention. After all, it was born with a silver spoon in its mouth, and its market value was once believed to exceed that of EOS, which is known as "Blockchain 3.0". Filecoin, which is based on the IPFS protocol and has joined the economic system, is naturally a star project in the minds of investors. As a result, its mining machines are being sold everywhere on the Internet; it has never said that it will be listed on the trading platform, but several platforms have its futures. It has not yet landed on the market, but many people have built applications based on it. “There are probably 500 IPFS mining machine brands on the market, and it’s a mixed bag.” An investor who invested hundreds of thousands of yuan in Filecoin mining machines last year said, “The majority are in Shenzhen. In the early stages, no one understood, so they would cheat if they could.” In fact, if you read the official website carefully, you will find that even Filecoin officials have not announced the hardware requirements for mining machines. "Retrieval miners earn filecoin by winning bids and mining fees for specific files determined by the market value of the file. The bandwidth of the retrieval miner and the bid/initial response time to the transaction (i.e., latency and distance from the client) will determine its ability to complete retrieval transactions on the network. The maximum bandwidth of the retrieval miner will determine its total transaction volume." This is the principle of Filecoin mining on the official website. There are several key factors in Filecoin mining: first, there must be users, and only when users upload files can the mine be mined; then, bandwidth, hard disk size, user distance, etc. must be considered before mining can be successful. Therefore, regardless of whether the various IPFS mining machine brands on the market have used the halo of star projects to deceive consumers, what is more important is that it is useless for investors to buy mining machines now because there is not even a main network. Yesterday, Filecoin officially launched a hard drive. The public opinion believed that this was to force miners to use their official mining machines and suppress other mining machine manufacturers. "Other mining machines cannot be used." Many people held similar views after seeing the official hard drive launch. The official hard drive has been released, and mining machine manufacturers are generally not worried According to the official introduction, this project called Discover is mainly to incentivize early miners to store valuable information in exchange for Filecoin tokens, "to help safely store data sets that are important to humanity." The Filecoin Discover store shows that this hard drive is priced at US$265 and has a capacity of 8TB. Most importantly, the hard drive stores data in the fields of climate science reports, disease tracking maps, etc., and purchasing users will receive a one-year guaranteed Filecoin storage agreement. Can an 8T hard drive containing certain data completely render other mining machine manufacturers' IPFS mining machines inoperable? The situation may not be that bad. BlockBeats asked several mining machine research and development companies focusing on distributed storage, and the responses were very different from what everyone thought. Su Minjie, co-founder of Anti-Entropy Technology, said that Discover can only be regarded as a project in the Filecoin ecosystem, and its main purpose is to promote the implementation of Filecoin, because these valuable data will be directly stored in the Filecoin network. "The official hard disks are now sold, which is actually through offline data transmission, so that the network will have a large amount of valuable data at the beginning of its launch." We have already mentioned the mining logic of Filecoin. Simply put, this is a kind of "storage mining", which depends on how many useful files you have stored. When a user uploads a file, the file will be divided into several fragments, and then miners have to grab the fragments of the file and put them into their hard drives to get Filecoin. Therefore, there must be data on the hard drive before you can make money. This is why Filecoin stores data on the hard drive. Xia Tian (pseudonym), the head of another mining machine production company, confirmed Su's statement, "My personal understanding is that it is a weighted tool for all miners on the network, but it is not a necessary tool." What Discover sells are official hard drives containing "valid data", which is actually an opportunity to provide miners with large-scale storage of important open source data. "(For the entire project) This is just the beginning." Su Minjie gave two reasons why the government launched this mining machine: First of all, network security. He said that Chinese people are very enthusiastic about mining. Currently, most of the nodes on the test network are from China. The official platforms used to communicate with the community have the most Chinese users, and many people even communicate directly in Chinese. "The enthusiasm of Chinese miners far exceeds the expectations of the project. Once the main network is launched, the computing power is likely to be concentrated in China, or even in some large miners. This is not only detrimental to the overall development of the project, but also easy to lead to 51% attacks." So selling hard drives is an attempt. But we are still skeptical about how much this move can alleviate the problem of centralization. Another consideration is the healthy development of the ecosystem. He said that the authorities underestimated the profit-seeking nature of miners in the early days. If there were no such paid hard drives, miners would definitely find ways to store a lot of junk data, which would most likely lead to a large amount of storage resources being wasted and deviate from the value orientation of the project. "The introduction of customer authentication mechanisms and offline data transmission mechanisms are actually aimed at solving the above two problems." Many mining machine manufacturers have made the following judgment on this hard drive: it is highly likely that it will not have any impact on the mining efficiency of the mining machines they developed. Currently, the variables in Filecoin mining still revolve around the design of the customer authentication mechanism, because until now, the official has not announced specific requirements. So, let’s sort it out. What is the difference between the hard drive officially launched by Filecoin and an ordinary hard drive? Just like the Switch game console, the most common game console is a bare machine with the ordinary black and red body color. There are no games in the machine, and what everyone buys is a bare machine. When the game "Animal Crossing" became popular, Nintendo launched the "Animal Crossing Limited Edition" Switch. The color scheme of this Switch comes from the game "Animal Crossing" instead of the ordinary color scheme, and the machine also has this popular game built in. In other words, players can play the Animal Crossing game as soon as they get this game console, without any other operations. This is the difference between Filecoin official hard drive and ordinary hard drive. The official Filecoin hard drive has stored some data, so that miners can use it on the mining machine when they get the hard drive. If someone needs this data, the miner can directly get the Filecoin reward without having to store the data on the empty hard drive. Just like the Switch Animal Crossing limited edition machine has a built-in game. Can we still participate in Filecoin network mining without this hard drive? Su said that this hard drive can be connected to their mining machine. "The hard drive standard is relatively simple. The difficulty of Filecoin mining lies in the software." It's just like playing Animal Crossing on a normal Switch, but there is an extra step of downloading. As Su Minjie said, the Filecoin team is very idealistic and hopes that the network will retain some data that is beneficial to mankind, such as climate science reports. Perhaps in their view, this data cannot be lost and will have high research value for future humans hundreds of years later. But now no one knows what the network utilization and popularity will be after Filecoin goes online. Miners are profit-driven. Are these data that are beneficial to humans also beneficial to the interests of miners? After all, the network still depends on miners to maintain it. Finally, we still want to remind investors that if you want to buy mining machines, you must pay attention to the risks and beware of being deceived. Filecoin mining machines are not like Bitcoin, which can be plugged in and work immediately. Understand the logic of Filecoin and invest carefully.
*BlockBeats reminds all investors to guard against the risk of chasing high prices. The views expressed in this article do not constitute any investment advice. --For more information about the blockchain industry, please scan the QR code to visit the official website-- |
