On November 27, a news announced by the Filecoin development team caused the IPFS community to explode. Why, the official Filecoin community administrator, said on social media, In the next development network, Filecoin mining has basically determined that a graphics card (GPU) is required.
The Filecoin team stated that it will adopt a GPU mining solution, source of information: Xingidea
In addition, Why also said that the current development team is using the nvidia 2080ti graphics card for testing, and the CPU or GPU performance required for Filecoin mining is still being tested.
The originally well-conceived mining of idle computing resources (PC) was immediately raised to a level, and many community users expressed that it was difficult to accept and was cheated.
secondary title
01. Filecoin, the darling of the blockchain community
It can be said that the Filecoin project has been wearing a halo since its birth, and has received high attention from the blockchain community.
In August 2017, once Filecoin was launched, it easily raised 257 million US dollars (including private and public funds), setting an ICO record at the time.
Juan Benet, founder of Filecoin and its distributed storage ecosystem IPFS, can be said to be a veteran figure among the initiators of distributed protocols, with a very high status. It is said that IPFS was open source almost at the same time as Ethereum, and it is the pioneer.
In addition, the development prospects of IPFS and its incentive layer, the blockchain project Filecoin, have always been optimistic by the industry.
IPFS is the industry-recognized future replacement for the http network transmission protocol. Xu Mingxing once said that IPFS will be the infrastructure of the entire society. The market demand for this infrastructure, together with the ambition of IPFS, is very large.
The market research company Gartner predicted in a report released that the global public cloud market will reach US$411.4 billion in 2020; Huawei’s Ten Trends for 2025 report stated that the global annual storage data volume will reach 180ZB in 2025 , which is nearly 24 times the total amount of data generated by Chinese netizens last year.
IPFS wants to be a distributed network that allows users to store, transmit, and retrieve data from each other. As a certain media said, One day, when everyone accesses the Internet, they no longer input http, but input ipfs, then the vision that IPFS wants to achieve will be realized.
In addition to IPFS, the blockchain project Filecoin has also received a lot of attention. Many blockchain participants regard Filecoin as another opportunity after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
So far, there is no good solution to the demand of the decentralized storage market, and the position of Big Mac is still vacant. Everyone is looking forward to the subversive market effect that Filecoin will bring. Therefore, although the Filecoin mainnet has not been launched for a long time, the markets positive response to Filecoin has long been ahead of the development progress of the project.
Filecoin mining machines are sold like crazy on the Internet. Although Filecoin officials have repeatedly emphasized that they should not buy any physical mining machines before the mining hardware specifications are announced, but driven by FOMO sentiment, investors flock to them (yes, investors always flood the market before users), IPFS The mining machine market once bloomed everywhere.
From the crowdfunding in August 2017 to the fiery half year of Filecoin in 2018, dozens of mining machine service providers with the label of IPFS mining appeared on the market. Filecoin token)” as a publicity point, competing to launch Maya, Hummingbird and other brands of mining machines.
It is understood that as of June this year, the number of Filecoin mining machines sold on the market has reached one million, and most miners have earned hundreds of millions of profits from this.
It is worth noting that the Filecoin mainnet has not been launched, and the official mining hardware parameters have not been announced. That is to say, the Filecoin miners cant wait to start the mining machine when the currency has not yet been mined, and they are not sure whether the mining machine will be able to mine the currency after the mainnet goes online. The popularity of Filecoin at that time can be seen.
Furthermore, the popularity of Filecoin has also brought about similar projects. Projects such as Sia, Genaro, Storj, and Lambda have been put into use, and some mining pools and miners have already obtained considerable mining income. For example, the founder of the Lambda project once said in an interview that our top ten mining pools and nodes all have annual revenues of hundreds of millions and profits of tens of millions.
Filecoin and similar projects, information source: Hashpie
In addition, according to online information, exchanges including LBank, Gate, and Top.one have already launched FIL (Filecoin token) futures; star projects such as EOS use IPFS as the underlying storage system; teams including BCH developers have already launched FIL (Filecoin token) futures; Use or build IPFS applications...
secondary title
02. At a critical moment, why did the Filecoin team modify the mining mode
However, the plot direction of the market is always unexpected.
This is what everyone expected, but the development process of Filecoin has been dragging the projects reputation back. The main network plan originally scheduled to go online in June 2018 has been postponed many times, and market confidence has been severely consumed. A Filecoin miner once described the progress of the Filecoin project like this: The IPFS team is like a scumbag when developing and operating Filecoin, perfectly presenting no initiative, no rejection, no commitment, and no responsibility.
On September 25, the Filecoin development team finally released new project progress: the testnet will be launched on December 11 this year, and the mainnet will be launched in March next year. But more than two months later, the team dropped another blockbuster: the mining mode will be changed from CPU mining to GPU mining.
The miners saw that the main network was about to go online, and the mining machines that had been hoarded for a year or two could finally come in handy. The official sentence of mining mode change instantly made the mining machines in the hands of some miners useless. Although the official stated that this amendment has been discussed in the community for several months, the market was still shaken out of dissatisfaction.
What happened when the mining mode was changed from CPU mining to GPU mining?
According to the official statement, the reason why the GPU mining mode is adopted is because the development team has modified the PoST algorithm, which adds a selection post process. After the miners obtain the right to produce blocks, they need to The PoST calculation is completed within 10 minutes.
Through communication with Dapao Xie, the first person in IPFS mining, BBNEWS learned that the reason why the Filecoin development team added election proof to the algorithm is to increase the randomness of the block producing nodes. (Filecoin) has been attacked by side chains before, and the development team has made many compromises. Dapao Xie said.
image description
Thanks for the information provided by Cannon
PoST is Proof of Spacetime. This operation is to prove that the storage node has stored the corresponding file within a certain period of time, and the generation of PoST proof involves a large amount of calculation. The PoST calculation speed of GPU is faster than that of CPU. Therefore, The introduction of GPU mining can ensure that the PoST proof is completed within the specified time. The reason why miners are required to complete the PoST calculation within one block cycle is to increase the attack cost of the attacker, because the calculation of PoST is relatively large.
This is what the official said GPU is just a supplement to the CPU. Why, a member of the development team, once explained: If you can find other ways to achieve fast calculations, you dont need a GPU.
In addition, the mining income of Filecoin cannot be improved by CPU or GPU performance alone, and there is no direct relationship between the two.
The probability of miners obtaining the right to generate blocks, as well as the benefits obtained through storage, mining, and retrieval activities depend on effective storage, and effective storage is affected by storage quotations, network conditions, CPU (GPU) performance, memory performance, hard disk capacity, algorithm optimization and other factors.
Influencing factors of effective storage, source of information: Encryption Valley Live
Just like Didi Taxi, the drivers income depends on the influence of comprehensive factors such as charging standards, driving distance, and time of day, and has little to do with the speed at which the driver takes orders. The income of Filecoin miners depends on the comprehensive influence of storage quotations, storage capacity and other factors, and has little to do with CPU (GPU) computing speed.
Even the Filecoin official stated that more GPUs cannot increase miners income, If one GPU can be used for multiple mining machines at the same time, it can reduce mining costs to a certain extent.
GPU mining is only a supplement to CPU mining, and has little impact on miners mining income, but the introduction of GPU mining mode has a considerable impact on miners input costs. In fact, the initial investment of many miners in mining machines may be in vain, and some CPU mining machines are indeed unusable.
According to Guanliange’s information, there are currently at least one billion worth of mining machines in the market waiting to be fed, waiting for Filecoin to go online for mining. In order to save costs, most merchants do not configure GPU card slots for Filecoin mining machines, which means that such mining machines cannot be converted into GPU mining machines, and all these costs will be submerged.
Secondly, even if the mining machine has a GPU card slot, most of the miners are non-professionals and do not have the ability to modify the mining machine. The purchase of GPU graphics card and the modification of the mining machine are a new cost for the miners. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the price of nvidia 2080ti is basically above 6000RMB.
Third, as Cannon Xie said, The development team made a lot of compromises. In order to maintain the fairness of mining, the beautiful vision of everyone can mine with idle computing resources once conceived by Filecoin has changed, and the mining threshold in this field has been raised.
Reference article:
Reference article:
The revenue exceeds 100 million, the golden period of the IPFS project is coming? 》by Hash Pie
Filecoin changed the rules, some people lost their money, while others saw an opportunity by Guanliange
