Filecoin testnet is online, the official team answered these 22 questions from miners

8 Q: In the latest roadmap, you said that the mainnet may be launched between March 23 and April 24, 2020. I would like to know what are your criteria for deciding to launch it?

A: The most critical requirement for launching Mainnet is that Filecoin is secure. We will not launch an insecure network. The next requirement is performance and functionality. Currently, the launch window is our best estimate. As we get closer, the window size will shrink and we will be able to pick a date.

9 Q: Can we attract/host data storage requirements from real-world projects during testing?

A: The network may experience resets during the testnet. We do not recommend storing customer data or other data that requires very reliable storage before the mainnet.

10 Q: It seems that the testnet is quite slow, what is your performance standard for the testnet? And in what way can you improve it?

A: The software used for the testnet has not been optimized for performance yet, the focus is on making sure everything works properly and the network performs its primary functions. We still have a lot of work to do in terms of optimization.

11 Q: Will we have an official wallet for Filecoin?

A: We are working with multiple hardware and software wallet projects and hope to have reliable Filecoin wallet support before the mainnet launch.

Q12: The recommended hardware is a huge barrier to entry for miners. Is the design decision worth considering, otherwise you won’t have a home miner with a small home server and NAS?

A: We are working hard to reduce the cost of sealing and proving. We do want to support smaller miners, but not at the expense of security. It is always possible to make things faster and cheaper through future optimizations, but it is difficult to make things more secure.

Question 13: Network latency and bandwidth, which is more important in mining?

A: Definitely make sure you have low latency (ideally, less than 100ms to other major countries), but I recommend at least a 50 megabit internet connection for bandwidth.

Q14: Is it reasonable to use “sealed workers” as this will lead to some unnecessary competition and make it difficult for ordinary miners to compete?

A: Sealing workers are used to distribute sealing work to different machines. Unless we can really reduce the cost of sealing, this will always be a no-brainer (although at some point you will max out the write speed of your hard drives). We provide these tools to help level the playing field for miners who will write their own versions of the software anyway.

Q15: Why don’t miners with only 32GiB power (which is the standard configuration in the faucet) appear on the dashboard? How do miners with more than 1TiB join?

A: Before miners appear in the power table, our minimum miner size is 512 GiB and can receive block rewards. You can achieve 512 GiB with 1GB or 32GB sectors. Miners with less than 32GB will not receive block rewards, but can still accept storage deals. Please note that these are testnet parameters and may change before mainnet.

Q16: Is a public IP always a requirement for mining Filecoin?

A: Yes, you need a public IP address, or you can have a separate machine with a public IP address that relays the connection back to the internal machine. The requirement is that you must be dialable on libp2p.

Q17: Will miners be punished if they do not accept a transaction that meets their latest asking price?

A: Transaction negotiation is done off-chain and miners will not be penalized at the protocol level. However, services and platforms can be built on top of the protocol and may incur some penalties.

Q18: Should miners prove that they have available free storage space?

A: This is actually part of the key economic mechanisms we are considering for the protocol. The Filecoin specification lists some other mechanisms and parameters that may still change during the testnet, but must be resolved before the mainnet launch.

Q19: If the mainnet is 100, what is your score for the testnet?

Answer: 42

Question 20: How much money can you make as a miner?

A: After mainnet launch, when real Filecoin tokens are available, that will depend on many things, including how many others choose to mind and the extent and speed of Filecoin adoption. We will release more information about Filecoin’s cryptoeconomic model in Q1, which may help you refine your calculations.

Q21: Is it possible that files may be lost?

A: No matter what type of storage provider you use, there is always a chance that a hard drive will fail or go offline. Today, centralized providers solve this problem by storing multiple redundant copies of your data. Filecoin gives you control to do the exact same thing in a truly decentralized way by replicating your data with multiple miners, based on your cost and reliability preferences.

Q22: If GPU computing is not considered a centralization risk, is it possible to create specific ASICs to efficiently compute and centralize proofs?

A: Filecoin mining is not GPU mining. Filecoin rewards miners based on the proportion of storage they add to the network. Filecoin mining is based on storage power consensus: having more power (proven storage) on the network is directly correlated to winning more block rewards. The amount of power a miner puts on the network is linearly related to the amount of storage the miner places on the network, not the number of GPUs they are running. Many different hardware configurations can be used to mine the Filecoin testnet.