2020 will soon pass, and there are too many focus events worth talking about this year.
The cold winter of cryptocurrency, the DeFi that came out halfway, the Polkadot ecology that was collectively unveiled, the Bitcoin that exceeded $20,000…
Filecoin was once surrounded by the spotlight when the mainnet was first launched.
After all, in the past two or three years, the sales of various “IPFS mining machines” have reached tens of billions of yuan, and it is finally time to cash out. But it soon fell into controversy and was covered by new hot spots, and slowly disappeared from public view.
So is Filecoin mining profit or loss?
The reporter interviewed several Filecoin miners and found that they were all mining, but the miners had different endings.
Filecoin miners sinking the market
In the past two or three years, although the Filecoin mainnet is still in the foreseeable future, the sales of mining machines have dropped dramatically.
At various blockchain exhibitions, you can see the aunts who play the capital plate enthusiastically preaching IPFS and Amway Filecoin mining machine.
Although the parameters of the mining machine were not announced yet.
Therefore, those mining machines that start at 200,000 yuan are essentially futures that are uncertain whether they can be cashed.
Naturally, it has been targeted by a large number of funds and MLMs-expensive and unverifiable attributes are very suitable for fooling.
Many investors bought mining machines in 2017.
At that time, Filecoin raised US$257 million in a month, breaking the ICO world record, making many investors believe in Filecoin’s strength and prospects. And Filecoin officially announced that the mainnet will be launched at the end of 2017.
The opportunity is not to be missed, the time will never come again. Many people chose to throw money into Filecoin at the time, but they did not expect to wait until October 2020…
During this period, although the mining machine cannot mine FIL, the mining machine is still selling well——
Because mining machine manufacturers have introduced policies that can pre-mine their own tokens and then exchange FIL after the mainnet is online.
Of course it is impossible to exchange it, so the ending can only be a runaway.
Among the many Filecoin mining machine manufacturers at that time, the snail interstellar mining machine may be the most involved scam, and it has already emerged in February 2019.
The Zhengzhou Public Security Bureau later filed an investigation into the suspected fundraising fraud case against the mining machine manufacturer and found that the funds involved in the case were as high as 2 billion yuan, affecting more than 7,000 investors.
More mining machines have passed the two or three years before the official launch of the main network, and persisted until the tide really receded.
Naked swimmer: Shut down, or fork
But the moment Filecoin goes online is when naked swimmers are revealed.
On October 15, 2020, the Filecoin mainnet was officially launched. Unsurprisingly, the group of miners generally wailed.
In fact, this scenario has been previewed in the previous “Space Race.”
Regardless of the strict economic model or the computing power requirements of the mining machines, the vast majority of mining machines are facing obsolescence, especially the small ones sold before.
Filecoin mining essentially uses enterprise-level servers + hard drives to store enterprise-level information, which not only requires high hardware, but also tests the operation and maintenance and technical capabilities of miners.
“The hardware threshold is very high, it requires very high equipment, and the cost is relatively high. It also requires professional IT operation and maintenance technology and maintenance. It is really difficult for ordinary users to participate.” IPFS code contributor and founder of StarBit Liu Siling said.
Therefore, those mining machines assembled by hard disks cannot even meet the basic configuration when performing Filecoin mining.
Of course, large mining machines priced at two to three million yuan are even more pitted.
“We bought other people’s mining machines at the beginning, and after the official release of the configuration, we discovered that the machine could not run at all,” said Liu Shuai, the co-founder of Hashweilai.
However, he said that later 1475 helped them with iterative updates, and now that batch of old mines have a small amount of income, producing two or three FIL every day.
However, more mining machines chose to shut down as scrap copper and rotten iron. In fact, even the scrap copper and rotten iron were not assembled. All these failures came silently.
However, there is no unparalleled road, and a group of mining machine manufacturers that were to be eliminated have united to strike or even fork, giving these mining machines the possibility of coming back to life.
They accused Filecoin of being unfriendly to miners, so they had to strike or even fork.
For example, the seven deadly sins of Filecoin that Han Weiping, chairman of MIX Group, once counted down, can be said to list all the criticisms of Filecoin.
1. File hash value calculation is not friendly to Intel storage instruction set;
2. The complex sealing process consumes too much computing resources;
3. The low TPS limits the development of the number of network nodes;
4. The pre-mortgage is too high, which is good for investors and not good for miners;
5. The official data set restricts the use of the storage network, and the data security is not high;
6. Frequent major technical changes;
7. The blockchain economic model is unreasonable.
“For miners who borrow money to mine Filecoin, such a slow return mechanism may bankrupt them.”
Han Weiping believes that FileCoinCash, which he wants to lead the fork, is a miner-friendly storage network.
However, according to the reporter’s verification of several Filecoin miners in the front line, they came to the conclusion that although their mining machines vary in size, they can generally pay back in June to August.
Therefore, the motives of those mining machine manufacturers who have loudly threatened to fork are self-evident. As for the practicality of their future fork chains, it must be marked with a big one:?
Pay back in half a year-make a fortune in silence
The miners who really make money have always made money in silence.
“We invested 2 million in the early stage, and now we expect to pay back in 180 days. The return on investment is still very good. It is much faster than BTC (BTC is 300 days+).”
As the co-founder of Hash Weilai, Liu Shuai revealed that the mining machine they assembled during the first phase of the Filecoin testnet can produce 6 FIL per day.
It is understood that the payback cycle of mainstream mining machines on the market is generally from June to August.
For example, the leading miner Star Alliance’s mining machine priced at 210,000 yuan can produce 16 FIL per day, and it will pay back almost in June to August.
For Filecoin miners, the most important thing is the packaging speed, which is the speed of data storage during the copy proof phase.
FIL daily output = cumulative effective data storage / effective data storage of the entire network * daily coin production of the entire network.
The daily effective data storage of the miner = packaging speed (GB/h)*24h. In other words, packaging speed determines effective storage, and effective storage determines yield.
Of course, the amount of FIL pledged by a single sector is also very important.
According to Filecoin’s economic model, storage miners need to pledge FIL tokens to obtain the right to block production.
Filecoin miner investor Aaron told reporters that he wanted to get the first wave of Filecoin’s dividends and invested a total of nearly one million.
“At that time, the mining machine manufacturer promised that the payback period was 4 to 6 months, and my price expectations for FIL were also high.”
But at present, he has not met his expectations, but more pessimistic.
Because unless additional investment is purchased to purchase FIL for pledge, he can pay back his capital in one year, otherwise his payback cycle is more than 3 years.
But in general, miners cooperating with leading mining machine manufacturers can basically achieve a payback from June to August, which is much higher than other types of mining revenue.
Variable-Filecoin’s effective computing power
Although the current return rate of Filecoin mining is very high, it is based on the premise that the current stored data is basically invalid.
“It can be said responsibly that more than 70% of the data on the entire network is junk data.” A Filecoin miner bluntly said that the data comes from web crawlers.
Although Filecoin only built a market based on IPFS and set up a set of market transaction rules, since content storage is involved, it must face content supervision issues.
Moreover, Filecoin officials have been emphasizing that “to lay a solid foundation for the information of human society”, so it is necessary to store publicly accessible scientific data, innovative mass media, historical archives and archives.
So how to verify that these data are valid data?
Filecoin officially will launch a terminal audit tool in the future. The specific implementation method is currently unknown, but the purpose is to guide users to safe and effective data.
At present, Filecoin has solved the storage problem, and it may soon be the turn to solve the validity of the data.
At that time, the difficulty of mining will increase significantly-because miners need to find customers with real needs (especially enterprise-level customers) to store data.
This keeps small miners out even more, but it is still a problem for large miners.
Although many head miners have begun to cooperate with centralized storage such as Alibaba Cloud-centralized storage companies will open distributed storage sections to attract groups with small amounts of data and low willingness to pay.
But I have to say that this is only a small piece of cake, and the bigger cake is still for enterprise users.
“Customers who are willing to spend money to store data are not worried about cost, but security, followed by cost.”
When HashWei came to discuss cooperation with different enterprise-level users, it had to face the problem that customers would worry about the data security of distributed storage——
Although Filecoin storage is actually more secure by dividing the data into 24 parts for distributed storage, this user needs a long education cycle.
But they have already talked about some corporate customers.
“At present, if you talk about cooperation with customers, cold data is still easy to talk about, but hot data that you can access and retrieve at any time is very difficult.”
Filecoin’s current network has only just been established. If the Filecoin ecosystem develops, it will be more secure and more convincing in terms of security, transmission, and encryption.
Not long ago, Filecoin and Huobi Group cooperated and launched the Huobi Filecoin Incubation Center, with US$10 million in funds to support the Filecoin ecosystem (concentrated in 3 areas: incubation, investment and community development).
This is whether the bottleneck of Filecoin’s effective computing power can be broken in the future.
FIL-Is there any improvement?
In fact, for most investors, evaluating the quality of a project only depends on the currency price.
Therefore, Filecoin is easy to be complained about, because FIL has not risen as much as people had previously expected, so many people feel that Filecoin has not improved like its currency price.
But in fact, this is the result of the intentional guidance of Filecoin.
Since there is not much FIL released in the market at present, FIL is basically controlled by the official, and the official does not want the price of FIL to fluctuate too much to affect the stability of the network.
So it will be in control for a long time…
Many miners think that after 180 days, the linearly released FIL will come out and hit the market, but in fact, if it falls too low, it is not in the interests of the miners.
And there are reasons to believe that Filecoin officials will surely protect the market when the time comes to keep the currency price stable…
Of course, longer-term things cannot be predicted.
Regarding Filecoin mining, shutting down the meat to stop the loss, closing the eyes of the fork, and the head miners making a fortune, they have different futures.
For ordinary investors, only cloud computing power and crowdfunding mining pools are left to go-if they still want to go.
