How much surprise can Filecoin bring? Let’s first take a look at the difference between it and BTC and ETH

The founder of BTC is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. After he mysteriously announced his withdrawal from the project development, no one has ever found him again. However, his departure has made BTC the most decentralized (without a founder) and most consensus-based currency in the past decade.

The founder of ETH is the young genius Vitalik Buterin. As ETH became the king of public chains, he and EOS founder BM became the leaders of the blockchain industry today.

The founder of Filecoin is Juan Benet, who graduated from Stanford University. Before creating Filecoin, he also created IPFS, which aims to build the next generation of the Internet in line with the HTTP protocol. Filecoin is the blockchain incentive layer created for IPFS.

ETH is a public chain. Although BTC is also a public chain, ETH pioneered the smart contract and is known as blockchain 2.0. The industry generally believes that the 2017 bull market in the digital currency market was led by ETH.

Filecoin is a storage project. It is an IPFS incentive layer created for IPFS and uses the blockchain token system. IPFS is likely to become the cornerstone of building the next generation of the Internet, and the decentralized storage market built by Filecoin will play an important supporting role.

At the same time, Filecoin's expected consensus based on the Proof of Spacetime (PoSt) mechanism is a useful consensus, so it is also called representing blockchain 3.0.

Satoshi Nakamoto's original dream of inventing Bitcoin was to create a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and a decentralized payment currency. The subsequent LTC and DOGE are both based on this concept.

The consensus mechanism of BTC is the PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism. The PoW mechanism generates blocks through a computing power competition. This is a strategy proposed by two economists in 1993. It is an effective blocking economic strategy to prevent the abuse of services or resources.

The advantages of PoW are that it is reliable, widely used, and a public chain consensus algorithm that has been fully tested in practice. However, its disadvantages are also obvious: it consumes too much extra computing power, consumes a lot of energy, and is not environmentally friendly.

ETH currently uses the "PoW+PoS" consensus mechanism and is currently moving towards pure PoS, but the progress is relatively slow. PoS consensus is the recently popular "Proof of Stake", a proof of stake mechanism that calculates the probability of a block according to the age of the coin.

The advantage of the PoS consensus mechanism is that it does not consume a lot of energy for computing power competition. The disadvantage is that the interest on deposited coins based on the age of the coins is not conducive to the circulation of tokens.

Filecoin's consensus mechanism is the expected consensus, and the main proof mechanism is the Proof-of-Spacetime (PoSt) mechanism, which stands for Proof-of-Spacetime. Based on the equity consensus PoS (Proof-of-Stake), Filecoin improved the consensus mechanism to PoSt to replace the Proof-of-Work PoW.

In the Filecoin system, miners complete storage, and users confirm that miners have completed storage. The "confirmation that miners have completed storage" here is Filecoin's consensus mechanism (PoSt). This "confirmation that miners have completed storage" will always exist in the Filecoin network, and users can check it at any time.

PoSt is generated by Filecoin when verifying that miners store user data. Filecoin converts the current storage data of miners in the network relative to the storage ratio of the entire network into voting power of the miner, where the probability of the network selecting a miner to create a new block is proportional to the storage they are using and the cost of the rest of the network.

Under the PoSt mechanism, miners would rather invest in storage rather than computing power to parallelize mining calculations. Miners provide storage and reuse computing to prove that data is stored to participate in consensus.

Using Proof of Storage (PoSt) to generate consensus does not waste computing resources and energy like Bitcoin, and can incentivize miners to invest more storage space (hard disk) resources rather than computing and energy resources to contribute to the network. This is a very environmentally friendly and efficient way.

Simply put, mining based on the PoSt mechanism is mining that requires a large amount of storage space (hard disk) and bandwidth resources.

Currently, BTC is the largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. Some people say that all digital currencies can be divided into two categories, Bitcoin and other currencies. This is obviously not a prosperous situation for the industry.

2020 is here, and the launch of the Filecoin mainnet is getting closer. For the many IPFS enthusiasts and Filecoin miners around the world who have been waiting for more than two years, 2020 will surely be a year of carnival and harvest!