Filecoin may be the most complex blockchain product on the market. Get the filecoin mainnet online time: FIL101
Filecoin is a Web 3.0 data storage project. It raised US$257 million in September 2017 and has been doing technology development since then.
Now, Filecoin is quieter than most of the past, and it focuses its energy on a very active incentive testnet. The test network is called "Space Race". Space Race 1 has ended and 60573.03 FIL tokens have been allocated to testnet participants, but the value of these tokens is difficult to assess because Filecoin refused to disclose details related to the FIL price.
Ian Darrow of Filecoin told CoinDesk: “Miners are learning a lot.” He said that the hardware cost of the testnet has exceeded $100 million and the data capacity has exceeded 200 PB. Darrow said: "In short, this exceeded expectations."
There is also a futures market for FIL tokens. In a recent letter to investors, the venture capital firm Pantera stated that the “trading price of Filecoin futures far exceeds our cost base”.
Filecoin creator Juan Benet (Juan Benet) has a very bright vision for the future of this project. The Filecoin network aims to become the next-generation data access market, competing with the Internet giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google that control data storage space, and the content distribution network Cloudflare.
Although storage costs are indeed declining, and storage space has actually become a commodity, Filecoin's point of view is:
Data storage requirements will explode soon.
A new type of storage space will be needed in the future, with redundancy and accessibility.
In the latest version of the roadmap, FIlecoin stated that the mainnet will be launched in mid to late September. Darrow told us that it is still in the preparatory stage.
Before the mainnet went live, Filecoin released a document titled "Creating the Filecoin Economy". The report explains: “Centralized cloud storage services do not allow customers to modify or verify backed up data. However, Filecoin allows customers to easily express their preference for reliability and cost.” Here are several key elements of the Filecoin system. Get filecoin mainnet online time: FIL101
Here are some key points.
- Miners need to provide a large amount of collateral to participate in mining
Darrow said: "Before, I think that one thing that many people did not fully understand is the operating mechanism and principle of miner pledges in the Filecoin system."
The so-called Filecoin mining mainly uses traditional storage systems to provide storage space. Because it is a commercial hardware, almost anyone with internet access can participate. The price of a high-quality 1 TB hard drive is around US$50, but most physical inputs cost far more than that.
The point is that Filecoin cannot use expensive dedicated hardware (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum mining machines) to prevent dishonest participants, so it requires miners to provide a large amount of collateral to prevent malicious participants from not fulfilling the promised period.
The Filecoin system requires miners to pay the pledge in advance. Block rewards will also be used as collateral to ensure that participants stick to their promises for a long time.
- In order to enhance the storage capacity of the network, Filecoin provides very attractive incentives.
Filecoin hopes to rapidly increase the storage capacity of the network, so it provides very attractive incentives to participants.
Darrow said: "In order to attract early participants, Filecoin provides very attractive incentives. In the early stages of the project, the mining rewards are the highest, and the participation of miners is the lowest, so it can attract a large number of users chasing benefits."
Filecoin has set a storage growth plan in advance, in which 70% of the mining rewards are tied to the network baseline. If the entire network does not reach the baseline, the block reward will be reduced to a corresponding level. "Creating the Filecoin Economy" pointed out: "The overall result is that Filecoin's rewards to miners are more compatible with the utility they and the entire network provide to users."
Filecoin will increase the baseline by 200% every year, and only when the network reaches more than 1% of the global storage capacity can the community choose to slow its growth rate.
Based on the "space race" situation, Darrow said: "It seems that the storage capacity of the Filecoin network in the first year will not be so high."
- The main problem is how to achieve commercial
In the beginning, people may not understand why Filecoin will reward participants who have not stored any data.
This is called "committed capacity". The committed capacity is actually empty storage space, but it has been encrypted by Filecoin and can be rewarded.
At first glance, this may not make any sense, but it is actually a question of system capacity.
Darrow said: "The last thing we want is that there is no excess capacity available in the network, or users do not know that there is excess capacity available in the network." In addition, since all nodes participate in the protection of the Filecoin blockchain, they All contributed to reaching consensus.
Nevertheless, Filecoin does not want participants to submit empty blocks for block rewards, so it introduces an incentive mechanism to encourage miners to find users.
- "Verified users" played a key incentive role
Providing services to verified users can earn higher block rewards. Verified users are companies that really need to conduct data transactions. The idea is that it is not difficult to become a verified user, but a verified user is more able to attract miners in the network to provide services for them.
"Creating the Filecoin Economy" explained: "Verified users are authenticated through a distributed network of validators."
Darrow said that verified users will become a group of large identifiable entities in the Filecoin ecosystem, but the specific list will not be made public. Potential groups of verified users include non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and foundations in the blockchain industry that need to store large amounts of data.
Compared with unverified data or empty blocks (because they are encrypted, the Filecoin network cannot distinguish between the two), storing the data of verified users will get a higher block reward. In fact, Filecoin is using verified data to attract more miners to participate.
Darrow said that in view of the attractiveness of the verified data, the Filecoin team expects that miners will actively develop businesses and strive to reach transactions with verified users, which will help strengthen the competition within the Filecoin system.
- It's not just Amazon cloud services that are threatened by Filecoin
It is often said that Filecoin is threatening Amazon cloud services or Dropbox, but Filecoin is more disruptive than this.
Filecoin is also trying to provide content delivery network (CDN) services.
The most famous CDN is probably Cloudflare. These CDN networks have played an important role on the Internet.
Although the data transmission speed is very fast, the world is huge. And it is obvious that the closer the user is to the file, the sooner the file will be received. Most stored data will never be accessed, so CDN services will never be needed, but some stored data are very popular.
For popular data, companies can provide retrieval services, which means they will charge customers for services. For example, Darrow said, if a video becomes popular, the CDN can cache a copy of the video globally and provide it to viewers.
These additional copies do not count towards the copies that users pay to save on Filecoin, but they can be used in the retrieval market.
Darrow pointed out that in many cases, storage service providers will also provide retrieval services, but service providers such as CDNs may also access certain files.
- Everything in the Filecoin system has a prepaid cost to get the filecoin mainnet online time: FIL101
Users use FIL tokens to pay for storage transactions. The price of FIL tokens fluctuates. The Filecoin system requires users to pay in advance before the transaction, but miners cannot receive payment until the promised deadline is reached.
"In addition to the pledge commitments of both parties, there is also a transaction payment between the user and the miner. This payment is already locked when the transaction order is on the chain. Therefore, the user's Filecoin price fluctuation risk is eliminated when they conclude the storage transaction The payment is distributed to the miners in batches in each payment cycle."
On the other hand, many users may be accustomed to pay-as-you-go, rather than prepaid models. Darrow said that after a trade-off, users only pay for what they need.
As funds on the Internet become more and more complex, there may be some third parties who seize this opportunity to provide advance payment services for companies that want to use Filecoin and charge these companies in a more flexible way.
- Filecoin treats every data block as unique
Regarding the Filecoin system, we also need to understand a very important concept: content addressing.
Addressing on the Internet mostly depends on location. Click on a URL to view the data you need. As time passed, the links on the Internet gradually became invalid. This has led to more and more bloggers linking to the archive instead of the source website.
Filecoin points to content, not location. In other words, no matter where a certain data is stored, it can be found out.
Users want to know that there are 101 copies of a file in the world, and can use cryptographic certificates to verify that each copy is unique and distributed all over the world.
This is Filecoin's vision for the future: as the Internet becomes more and more important, users' needs for storage service providers will become more refined.