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Source: BBNews On February 20, 2020, the Filecoin official blog updated the latest project roadmap. According to the project time plan shown in the roadmap, the deadline for the first phase of the Filecoin testnet will be postponed to April 17, 2020. The second phase of the testnet, originally scheduled from February 24 to April 24, was adjusted to April 20 to June 12, and the mainnet launch window was postponed to June 15 to July 17 in the second half of the year. So far, this highly anticipated project has delayed its progress and launch date for the fourth time. Even Filecoin, which came out with a "golden key", is bound to be criticized and complained by some followers. To this end, the FileCoin official team also explained the main reasons for this delay in a blog post: (1) Due to the impact of the epidemic, many Chinese miners were unable to return to work on time, and therefore were unable to participate in the second round of testing on time. Some members of the Chinese community also expressed to Protocol Labs that they hoped to extend the second phase of testing by 2 to 3 weeks until most miners could return to work safely. Out of consideration for the safety of miners and their opinions, Protocol Labs decided to postpone the second phase of testing. (From the current results, the second phase has been delayed by 6 weeks) (2) Protocol Labs believes that the most important criterion for Filecoin to go online is stable security, which is the significance of the current test network and another important reason for the delay. According to the current feedback from the test network, the stability of the Filecoin network cannot be fully guaranteed. In order to ensure the security of the launch, it will take some time to repeatedly test and verify. The deadline for Phase 1 was postponed to April 17, and Phase 2 and the mainnet were also postponed. Is the epidemic just an "excuse" for further delay? Regarding the epidemic reason mentioned by the Filecoin team, it is true that some domestic companies have not yet started work, and the deployment of mining pools and mines and even the configuration of mining machines have undoubtedly been affected. Moreover, more than 70% of Filecoin's nodes are concentrated in China. It seems that most nodes are indeed unable to participate in the test normally, and the delay is reasonable. But in fact, once the news of the delay in the Filecoin project was released, the domestic community was almost unanimous in complaints. A user complained to Bibi News that: "Filecoin mining machines have been sold for several rounds, but the income from Filecoin mining has not yet been seen. How can I not complain?" Some users also told us that "Domestic companies are resuming work well. The overall resumption rate in the eastern region has reached 70%, and in Zhejiang it has even recovered to over 90%. The impact of the epidemic on miners and nodes is actually not that great. It is very far-fetched for the Filecoin team to use the epidemic as an excuse." From a factual perspective, Filecoin’s repeated delays have indeed caused “public resentment,” and many people do not buy the argument that the epidemic is one of the reasons. So, what is the real reason for Filecoin's delay? What is the Filecoin team busy with? To answer these questions, Bibi News consulted with Filco CEO Xie Dapao, the first person to mine IPFS. Xie Dapao believes that the epidemic is indeed not the main reason for the postponement of Filecoin's launch, but to say that the Filecoin team used the epidemic as an "excuse" is indeed a bit of an exaggeration. Xie Dapao summarized the three main factors for project delays he analyzed: (1) Filecoin is currently in the first phase of the testnet. During this phase, the Filecoin team has a very important and extremely time-consuming task, which is to achieve interoperability between the go-filecoin and lotus clients. (2) The economic model of the token and the data structure of the proof have not yet been finalized, and it will take a lot of time to determine these contents. (3) The code audit work will take at least two months to complete. Filecoin first completed the implementation of two clients, one is go-filecoin and the other is lotus. The reason for launching two versions of the client is that when there is a problem with the code of one client, the other client can still run normally, ensuring that the entire Filecoin network will not be paralyzed due to errors in the implementation of a single client. “There are precedents for the reliability of this model, the most typical example of which is Ethereum,” Xie Dapao explained. “Ethereum also has two types of nodes, go-ethereum based on the Go language and Parity based on Rust.” “The emergence of Parity has made up for many problems in the original go-ethereum. It can be said that the current security and stability of Ethereum are inseparable from this operating model. The Ethereum 2.0 that the Ethereum team is currently working on has as many as 8 versions implemented.” Filecoin officials have also made it clear in the past that after the first phase of testing, they hope to enter the second phase of the testnet with multiple secure, high-performance, and interoperable Filecoin implementations. To achieve this goal, Filecoin recently launched two other client implementations besides go-filecoin and lotus - forest and fuhon. The simultaneous follow-up of four implementations is almost unprecedented among all blockchain projects that have not yet launched the mainnet, which fully demonstrates that the Filecoin team puts the security of the mainnet first. Currently, the first phase of testing is only focused on completing the mutual communication and unified standards between go-filecoin and lotus versions. This means that the interoperability testing and stability between multiple versions will still be a huge workload in the future. Therefore, even after repeated delays, the schedule in Filecoin’s current latest roadmap is still marked as “tentative”. In the latest project roadmap, many stages are still in a "tentative" state In addition, Xie Dapao also mentioned that "the workload of proving circuit optimization also contributed to the extension of the first phase of the test network." Currently, Filecoin uses GPUs to complete zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proofs. Xie Dapao pointed out that the current optimization speed of GPUs is still relatively slow, but the Filecoin team hopes to reduce the time it takes for GPUs to generate proofs to half of the original time through circuit optimization. "From the project's perspective, these code updates, tests, and performance leaps are all moving in a more stable and positive direction. So to some extent, this delay seems somewhat excusable," Xie Dapao concluded. Will FileCoin experience further delays? Many followers have gradually lost their patience and expectations for Filecoin due to its repeated delays, but many people are still confused about whether Filecoin will be delayed again. In this regard, Xie Dapao also expressed his views to us: “From the development log of the main developer of the lotus client, we can see that the updates of Filecoin-related codes have been very frequent, which means that the official team has a heavy development task, especially the interoperability between the two versions mentioned above. And the crucial token economic model will not be finalized until April 17, before the start of the second phase.” Xie Dapao said that the undiscovered bugs in the code and the economic model of the token are both very large variables. Considering that the time nodes in the roadmap are still marked as "tentative", further delays are not impossible. “The end of the first phase of the testnet in April is critical because after the second phase starts, the testnet will be in a relatively stable state. There won’t be many new features at that time, and the code changes will not be big, so the progress of the entire project can be basically determined.” As for the group that has high expectations for Filecoin or has invested in Filecoin mining, people like Xie Dapao who hold a more moderate attitude towards the current status of Filecoin are actually not the majority. Miner Wang Yu (pseudonym) revealed to Bibi News: "The miners have the most complaints about this delay, and many miners are getting impatient." Wang Yu pointed out that the Filecoin test network currently has more than 3PB of data. In other words, hundreds or even thousands of servers are already running, and a large number of mining machines are also in preparation. But now the project has been delayed again, and the interests of the miners who have invested real money have been directly damaged, so naturally they complain the most. Bibi News also learned from Wang Yu that a considerable number of miners had already bought mining machines as early as 2018 and 2019. However, the test network had not yet been launched at that time, and whether they could mine and make profits were still undecided. By the end of 2019, Filecoin officials requested the addition of GPUs for zero-knowledge proof calculations, and later stated that they would no longer support 1GB sectors and instead support 32GB sectors. As for this series of operations by Filecoin officials, earlier mining machines may have been eliminated in large numbers. If the launch of the main network is delayed further, or there are some variables in the middle, the number of eliminated mining machines will only increase. A large number of miners will face the dilemma of scrapping mining machines and difficulty in recovering costs before they even participate in mining. "Many miners, myself included, had already lost their patience by this time." Judging from the current roadmap, if miners want to officially participate in Filecoin mining, they will have to wait until the mainnet window period in June at least. As for the stability of the mainnet, they may have to wait even longer. When analyzing what changes might happen to Filecoin in the future, Xie Dapao also mentioned: “June to July is a process of gradual accumulation of computing power. Before that, miners were still worried. So for miners, Filecoin’s behavior this time should indeed be condemned.” |
