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Original title: "FL in-depth analysis | What you need to know about the new Filecoin mining plan" Original author: Fan Xuxin
On November 27, a message about using GPU for mining was leaked on Protocol Labs’ official Slack, which was interpreted by many “clickbait headlines” as CPU mining machines being “annihilated” and suffering a “catastrophic disaster.”
When I first saw this news, I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I had heard that the official was discussing the plan to add GPUs about half a month before. However, it should be emphasized that GPUs are only an addition, not a replacement for CPUs. As shown in the figure below, the official also explained that each machine only needs one GPU, and more GPUs will not bring actual profit improvement.
I didn’t expect that this news would be over-interpreted by some uninformed media, so I think it is necessary to explain the mining principles of Filecoin to set the record straight.
1. Filecoin storage type is directional storage
The first point that needs to be emphasized is that Filecoin is different from other decentralized storage projects. In other projects, users interact directly with the platform and do not know which miner stores the data. Filecoin provides a platform similar to Taobao, where users can choose miners to store data, that is, Filecoin uses directional storage. As shown in the figure below, users can choose the miners responsible for storage when storing files.
2. Filecoin’s architecture and operation process
As shown in the figure above, the Filecoin architecture consists of three parts, namely the storage market, the Filecoin blockchain, and the retrieval market. The corresponding types of miners are storage miners and retrieval miners, and repair miners may appear in the future. As the name implies, storage miners are mainly responsible for storing files and maintaining the Filecoin blockchain. Correspondingly, the income of storage miners also includes storage fees, block rewards, and transaction fees. The main task of retrieval miners is to retrieve data, and the income they receive is the retrieval fee. In the early stage of the Filecoin mainnet, due to limited storage capacity, there is not much demand for retrieval, but as the amount of data increases, retrieval income may be higher than storage income. The specific sources of income for various types of miners are shown in the figure below:
3. Filecoin’s consensus mechanism
Filecoin adopts the EC (Expected Consensus) consensus, which can be simply understood as a revised version of the PoS consensus. In the PoS consensus, the rights and interests represented by the mortgage tokens determine the probability of the miner obtaining the packaging right, while in the EC consensus, this right and interest is transformed into effective storage, that is, the amount of effective storage determines the probability of the miner obtaining the packaging right.
What is effective storage? Simply put, effective storage is the storage data generated by running PoRep (Proof of Replication) and PoSt (Proof of Spacetime). PoRep and PoSt are the characteristics of Filecoin, and their main function is to prevent miners from cheating or launching certain malicious attacks. PoRep is also called proof of replication. Its main function is for a node to prove to another node that it has stored a copy of the corresponding file. PoSt is also called proof of spacetime. Its main function is to prove that a node has stored the corresponding file within a certain period of time. PoSt is executed in a certain period, and its main purpose is to prevent miners from deleting data after the proof is completed.
As shown in the figure below, through the above analysis, we can know that in the Filecoin storage process, the core factor that determines the miner's income is effective storage. The proportion of the miner's own effective storage to the effective storage of the entire network determines the probability of obtaining the packaging right, and then determines its "mining" income. As shown in the figure below, there are many factors that determine effective storage, and CPU performance is only one of them.
4. Is the GPU solution really used to replace the CPU solution?
In fact, in the early stage of Filecoin's launch, most miners' income did not come from storage orders, but from block rewards. Therefore, most miners would choose to fill up their hard disk space with garbage data as quickly as possible to obtain as much effective storage as possible. The ideal situation is to turn all of their own storage space into effective storage as soon as possible, and when there is a real storage order, gradually delete the original garbage data and store the corresponding order data.
The reason why there are so many misunderstandings is mainly because many people do not understand the Filecoin mining process and equate this process with Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining has gone through several stages, including CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC. Therefore, many people think that after Filecoin adopts the GPU solution, the previous CPU solution will no longer work. Some even think that Filecoin will release ASIC mining machines.
So what does the official GPU solution mean? In fact, the main reason is that Protocol Labs has modified the PoSt algorithm. The PoSt calculation must be completed within a block cycle to obtain the packaging right. At this time, the performance of the general CPU cannot meet this condition, so the GPU is needed to accelerate the calculation within a cycle. Unlike Bitcoin mining, which evolved from CPU to GPU, the main reason for Bitcoin's evolution from CPU to GPU is that the GPU runs faster than the CPU, has better parallelism, and can perform more Hash operations at the same time. Filecoin currently uses GPU only because the GPU's PoSt calculation speed is faster than the CPU, and PoSt only needs to be calculated once within a block cycle to obtain the packaging right. There is no saying that GPU replaces CPU. Protocol Labs officials also stated that adding more GPUs will not increase revenue. On the contrary, if a GPU can be used for multiple machines, it can reduce costs to a certain extent.
5. Conclusion
In layman's terms, Filecoin mining is not simply about improving CPU performance to get higher mining benefits. Filecoin has a very complex computing process. Currently, GPUs cannot significantly improve other aspects of the process, and the cost of GPUs is higher than that of CPUs. Therefore, it is not cost-effective to use a pure GPU solution. At present, GPUs are more of a supplement to existing solutions rather than a replacement. Filecoin's block rewards mainly depend on effective storage, so those who participate in the early stage will have certain advantages, and there will be a certain Matthew effect. However, when Filecoin miners turn all their own storage space into effective storage, the probability of obtaining packaging rights will continue to be diluted as the effective storage of the entire network increases, and there will be no higher requirements for performance at this time. Therefore, after the storage space is saturated, the demand for performance will further decline. In the long run, the demand for hardware performance optimization in the Filecoin mining process is not strong.
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