IPFS mining machines have entered a strange outbreak period, and all miners have been cleaned up

In 2018, various main chains have been emerging one after another. Compared with cryptocurrency speculation, mining, which was previously out of favor with Bitcoin, has recently emerged again. The communities of various cryptocurrency and blockchain circles have been flooded with keywords such as mining and mining machines. After paying attention to it for a while, the author found an interesting phenomenon. Nowadays, the most popular one among Chinese miners is no longer Bitcoin, but the highly anticipated distributed protocol storage - IPFS.

If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. When all miners are sharpening their knives towards IPFS, it is easy to create a focus of interests, and at this time, speculators and those who are good at taking advantage of loopholes will come out to cause trouble.

A random search on the Internet will reveal dozens of hard advertisements and soft articles from IPFS mining machine brands. There is even a Baidu bidding ranking, which shows how fierce the competition is. If you open the soft articles, you will find that there are many mining machine manufacturers who claim that they can make back their investment in one month or 40 days.

The author contacted a recognized technical expert in the industry and concluded that Filecoin mining is not overly dependent on hardware. The most important factor affecting miners' income is bandwidth, and it is also much more "friendly" in terms of power consumption and other issues. For the majority of miners, the initial investment cost is relatively low. However, because of this, many so-called "IPFS mining machine" companies have emerged on the market, carrying out large-scale false marketing in the name of mining.

So, what are the factors that most directly affect Filecoin mining?

The author believes that bandwidth comes first. The reason why bandwidth is placed in the first place is that IPFS mining is different from Bitcoin and Ethereum mining machines. IPFS mining machines do not need to share computing power, but they are very dependent on the stability of the backbone network. If the network is unstable and there is a disconnection and no timely restart, the IPFS protocol will assume that you are not online, thereby punishing your mortgage coins, which will not be worth the loss. Therefore, no matter how good the configuration is, it cannot withstand poor bandwidth. On the contrary, even if the configuration is ordinary, but the bandwidth is strong, your income will be considerable.

There is a widely circulated saying on the Internet that "IPFS mining is hard disk mining", which actually distorts some facts. The author even suspects that this is a marketing strategy of hard disk manufacturers. The larger the hard disk capacity, the more things it can store and the greater its capacity. This statement sounds correct at first glance.

However, the hard disk is not the most critical performance indicator for measuring IPFS mining machines. For example, the premise for FIL storage miners to participate in block creation is that they need to be elected as a Leader before they can participate in block creation. The efficiency of creating blocks is related to the ratio of the current storage data of the storage miner to the storage data of the entire network, which is also the so-called computing power. The larger the hard disk space, the greater the computing power.

The impact on other factors including CPU, memory, system, etc. is minimal. The core system of the mining machine is best to be Linux. Currently, more than 95% of the global server market chooses Linux, which has been verified by time. Windows is not recommended as an operating system.

As long as it is an enterprise, it must comply with these two business rules: either the customer acquisition channel is almost free, such as Weibo, WeChat and Douyin. Or it can extract high value from each user, such as cash loans and big games.

The author believes that mining machine manufacturers currently fully meet the second requirement. They take advantage of the fact that everyone wants to be a miner and is unwilling to lag behind in the first batch, and constantly spread various rumors that "the first batch of mining will have the highest returns." In fact, Filecoin mining has little to do with time. In the early stage of Filecoin mining, the income is mainly block rewards, and the storage income, retrieval income, and token mortgage are very small. The later it is, the more advantages small investors have for home mining machines.

If a mining machine manufacturer sets a very high price, then you should pay attention. The mining machine ecosystem is not like traditional mobile phones, cameras, computers, etc. The high price of a mining machine does not mean high quality, because the configuration of the mining machine does not actually have a big impact. All those who talk about how high-tech and high-content the mining machine configuration is actually unprofessional.