The crypto industry has corresponding hot spots every once in a while, and the most concerned project recently is Filecoin.
Today we are not talking about the future of decentralized storage, just want to see the return on investment of Filecoin. Before the mainnet went live, many people had high hopes for Filecoin, but after the launch, various signs showed that this delayed Filecoin did not seem to be so good that it was praised by others, but was controversial. Before going online, because the design mechanism was unfairly crusade and forked by the community; after going online, because the miners did not have enough coins, they were suspected of encountering strike protests, and Filecoin officials seemed to be able to implement the block reward mechanism only with strong opposition from the community. Fix.
The mainnet has been online for 5 days, and the price of FIL tokens dropped from US$200 to US$30. The miners that miners bought at a high price have not yet brought the expected high returns. In the current turbulent market, the miners seem to only Can continue to bet on the future.
An overseas project “led” by the Chinese
On the evening of October 15th, the Filecoin mainnet was successfully launched. Let’s take a look at the situation of the project five days after its launch.
According to the Feihu FILFOX browser, as of October 20, the effective computing power of the entire network is 605.58 PiB, the number of active miners is 556, the average 24-hour mining revenue is 0.2478 FIL/TiB, and the output in the past 24 hours is 152,586 FIL, but FIL Compared with 3 days ago, the unit price has fallen by 50%, and the price is $32.05.
Although this project was founded and developed by an overseas team, most of the players who invested a lot of money and energy for this came from China. Not to mention how many of the official mining machine manufacturer logos collected before the launch are domestic brands. After the mainnet launch, it has firmly occupied the top 10 nodes in the mining rankings. From the name alone, it can be known that almost all are from China.
Although it was founded by an overseas team, the project where the head miners are almost “controlled” by the Chinese people can’t help but think of the previous EOS.
Before the EOS mainnet went live, although the transaction volume was not the most in China, China had the most participating nodes. At that time, it was considered to be a national war that was triggered before the mainnet went live. Some even I am worried about whether other Korean hot money, such as South Korea, will be withdrawn from the EOS market as the Chinese “bookmaker” controls the EOS node.
Due to dissatisfaction with the voting and dividend mechanism of EOS, community members launched the EOS Force (EOSC) before the EOS mainnet went live; the same is true for Filecoin today. Also out of dissatisfaction with the official design mechanism, before the mainnet went live, Forked projects such as Filecoin Vision and Filecash have appeared in the community, but they have not yet been widely recognized and supported by encrypted wallets and trading platforms.
After the launch, Filecoin is still controversial.
Mining 70 days to pay back?
Like Bitcoin mining, in order to participate in Filecoin mining, heavy asset investment is also required. Guazi Power’s Filecoin mining pledge/revenue calculator roughly calculates the mining payback period. If calculated according to the cloud computing power sold by a platform before 1T/year 2500 yuan, the pre-staking currency required for 1T computing power is about 6.0416FIL, and at the price of FIL 210.24 yuan, the pledge cost is about 1270.19 yuan.
If mining can be done at full speed, the daily income is about 53.46 yuan, and the expected payback period is 46.8 days, which is about 1.6 months. Even if the pledge cost is added, the corresponding payback period is only 70 days.
The short return period is surprising. It seems that Filecoin mining is a good business. Is that really the case?
Let’s take a look at the current situation of Filecoin miners. Calculate the cost first. Take a 60TB mining machine on the market as an example. If it is to be sealed within 90 days (as stated by the mining machine manufacturer), then 0.6666TB will be sealed every day, which is approximately equal to 682GB, each sector It is 32G, which is equivalent to storing 21.3 sectors every day. Miners need to submit 3.4 FILs (21.3*0.16) for these 21.3 sectors every day, and these 3.4 FILs must be invested every day until the storage space is full after 90 days. During this period, a total of 306 FIL (3.4*90) need to be pledged. According to the price of FIL 210 yuan on October 19, the pledge cost is about 64260 yuan. The price of the mining machine is calculated at the price of 200,000 yuan, and the total cost is about 264260 yuan.
What are the benefits? At a rate of 0.6666TB per day and an average mining income of about 0.25 FIL/TB in the past 24 hours, 0.16665 FIL can be obtained on the first day; 0.3333 FIL can be obtained on the second day, and so on. A total of about 682 FIL (0.16665*(1+2+…+90)=682.4) will be obtained after the deposit is full on the 90th day. According to the price of FIL 210 yuan, the 90-day income is about 143,220 yuan.
If there is no accident, the mining machine can get about 15 FIL every day according to the full storage power, and the return period of the mining machine is about 129 days.
In fact, the 129-day payback is only the ideal state. According to the analysis of Nicolas Bernard, the co-founder of Lianzhi Consulting, if you take a 350TiB server purchased from a Filecoin service provider for $20,000 as an example, only about 1TiB can be sealed every day. It will take at least 210-350 days to complete the storage, and a large number of machines are currently “idle”.
At present, many miners’ machines are not mining at full speed, and the limiting factor is that there are not enough pledged coins. According to Filecoin’s design mechanism, if miners want to participate in mining, they need sector pledge. The sector pledge amount is 0.1894 FIL/32G, which means that miners need to submit 0.1894 pledge coins for each 32G sector.
It is understood that most of this part of the pledged coins comes from the rewards obtained by miners during the space race. In other words, if miners have no reserves in the space race, they can only buy in the secondary market or use borrowing to solve the pledge problem. Several miners all told Rhythm that although the pledge pressure is high, most of the FIL pledged at present is derived from the space race, and there is basically no massive purchase from the secondary market, “the price is too expensive.”
On the other hand, the FIL rewards obtained by some miners for mining were not fully reinvested for pledge. After the mainnet went live, due to the high price, they chose to sell them back in the secondary market.
At present, the effective computing power of Filecoin’s entire network is about 600 PiB. According to Nicolas’s knowledge, the current sealing rate is only 1/7. It can be estimated that the computing power that appears in deployment has actually reached the scale of 4200 PiB (600*7). “This part of the hardware The total value of the investment has reached 240 million US dollars.” He believes that this is only a conservative estimate, “not counting undeployed machines.”
The investment in hardware equipment is already a huge expenditure. With the launch of the mainnet, miners also need to invest in FIL. Because the government no longer subsidizes the cost of miners, miners have slowed down the growth rate, and some miners can calculate within 24 hours. The force increment has dropped to zero. “The miners provided tremendous support during the development of Filecoin, but they are tired now,” Nicolas said. “The highly anticipated launch of Filecoin is disappointing, and there is an atmosphere of disappointment among the miners.”
In fact, long before the project went live, many miners already had opinions on the project.
Game between miners and officials
As a decentralized storage project that has caused the crypto community to wait for 3 years, in addition to the community’s dissatisfaction with Filecoin’s several delays, more miners are unacceptable to Filecoin’s design mechanism.
On the eve of the mainnet launch, when the market generally has different attitudes towards Filecoin, miner Jemin expressed deep concern about Filecoin. He frankly said to Rhythm BlockBeats that although the mainnet is about to go live, he felt that “this project is going to die.” Up”.
Although the official rush to lower the entry threshold of mining machines on the eve of the launch, 100 FIL compensation for miner nodes whose available Filecoin balance is negative, so that miners have no debt before entering the main network, the market is basically right Official praise, but in Jeming’s view, the core mechanism of the project has not changed, nor has it completely solved the issue of collateral: “Big miners still have computing power for the space race, but small miners have nothing.”
The day before the Filecoin mainnet went live, a fork project called Filecash was launched ahead of schedule. “I think Filecoin itself is dying, and it gives a lot of opportunities for fork coins.” In Jemming’s view, Filecoin’s rules are based on the project According to the party’s own wishes, “For example, the block rewards received by miners who participated in stress tests and protocol improvements in the space race are all migrated, and the test coins are directly used as the mainnet coins.”
Until the launch of the space race in August this year, the community generally believed that the test coin would be invalidated after the mainnet went live. According to Filecoin core developer “Why”, the code base will never be frozen.
This leaves room for official adjustments. On October 18th, due to fierce protests from miners, Filecoin officials had to pass the FIP-0004 proposal to directly release 25% of the block rewards for storage miners, while the other 75% of the rewards were still released as originally planned. The first game between the miners and the government was victory.
The impact of the official unlocking of 1.5 million FIL for “market value management” without informing the community without following the white paper regulations is still fermenting. According to data from filscan on October 20, there are currently a total of 20,109,798.92 FIL in circulation across the entire network, and this amount is far from the original unlocking plan.
According to the analysis of Cannon Ratings, the current circulation of FIL is close to 30 million. The “extra 26.5 million” is the miners who have put the previous test coins into the market and “smashed and harvested.” This is the FIL price from 200 at the opening. The reason why the U.S. dollar fell to 30 U.S. dollars is, “As for why the test currency became the real currency of the main network, whether it was a bug in the team’s code writing or negligence in configuration, or the team deliberately did it, we still don’t know.”
“The project is about to go live, everyone still doesn’t know what the detailed rules are.” A few hours before the mainnet went live, Jemin was still confused, “It feels like it’s the mainnet now.”
Uncertainty is the biggest problem facing Filecoin. There is no economic model widely recognized by miners, and the project has not reached the stage of transition to community governance. It is foreseeable that even if the mainnet has been successfully launched, the tug of war between miners and the official will continue. , Filecoin’s parameters may be changed at any time, and this will become the sword of Damocles hanging high above all miners.
For miners with low risk tolerance, it is time to make a decision.
