Filecoin stands at a crossroads | chain catcher

In his keynote speech at the Wanxiang Summit this year, the founder of IPFS&Filecoin, Juan An, stated that Fielcoin’s deeper mission is to create a distributed, efficient and powerful foundation for human information and change the basic business case of storage providers in today’s economy. And cost structure.

It is undeniable that this is a very disruptive mission, and it has also become the unanimous evangelistic declaration of many stakeholders in the three years since Filecoin was launched. During the period, Filecoin received a lot of doubts due to frequent delays in launching, and after the official launch of the main network, these visions fell into an awkward position in the fierce game between miners and the official due to issues such as pre-collateralized coins.

When the much-anticipated aura met with skepticism from the Slack community and the outside world, the extreme contrast urged the performance of a chaotic scene within the Filecoin wall, and discussions on related topics such as distributed storage, the lack of economic model design, and the gap between Chinese and foreign innovators. , Not only shows that Filecoin's disruptive mission is facing impacts and challenges to a certain extent, but also makes Juan's label of "dictator" more intriguing.

Author |Wang Dashu

Mining wave supported by wealth effect

"No one stipulates that miners must devote to Filecoin for a long time, and miners have no such obligation. When Filecoin no longer has a profitable effect, miners are free to leave." Song Jiang, who often makes mistakes, is even considered a "stab" not long ago Say so in the Slack community.

This is not the first time that Song Jiang has expressed a fierce opinion. He will appear in almost every important node in the development of Filecoin, especially when the Filecoin pre-mortgage issue was alive and well some time ago.

At that time, the circulation of FIL in the market was far from meeting the actual needs of storage miners. For this reason, the Filecoin community urgently approved the FIP 0004 proposal, announcing the direct release of 25% of the storage miner's rewards, and the remaining 75% of the block rewards will be released linearly within 180 days according to the original rules , Trying to solve the problems of pledge caused by the scarcity of FIL in the early stage.

However, from a practical point of view, the direct release of the 25% storage miner reward did not stimulate a large number of miners to participate in mining, and the growth of the entire network's computing power is still very slow. There are roughly two reasons. One is that the number of prosperity FIL after the release of 25% storage miner rewards still cannot support the entry of large computing power (most miners are still waiting for investors to be willing to solve the issue of pledged coins), and the other is because the official proposed The lending plan has not yet been implemented, and miners are waiting for the implementation of other official solutions.

The essence of these two reasons is as Song Jiang said. The current economic model of Filecoin weakens the money-making effect. In addition to his sharp rhetoric at this level, he is also very critical of the official team.

"In my opinion, the official team is a group of childish children, full of idealism and fairy-tale fantasy about the future. They expect all Filecoin participants to be intimate, work together and create a better future together. In the blockchain world, officials, miners, exchanges, large investors, retail investors, and market makers are full of cruel games. It is a group of beasts fighting each other on the grassland, vying for the rights of territory and survival. And all of this The game must be maintained through sophisticated economic models, and consensus is reached through open source code. If the thinking does not change, how can a perfect system be designed?"

And these arguments will inevitably arouse the disgust of the miner community. Some people even attacked him in the name of squirting, spitting, and Sun Justin’s lackeys. But no matter what Song Jiang’s intentions are, the mining boom in the miners’ circle has been exposed this year. It is the nature of people to pursue profit.

"90% of the miners are Chinese. With the wealth effect of Bitcoin as a lesson, who doesn't want to make some quick money while having a good story." Xia Bing, an investor who has been following the distributed storage field since March ( (Pseudonym) frankly confessed to the chain catcher that everyone says that they are value investments, and only making money in private is true. For miners, only Filecoin has a better reputation and more participants, the more beneficial it is, so even if they are dissatisfied, I don't want to see a bad public opinion environment.

Although many discussions have not yet reached a conclusion, in the short term, Filecoin's great mission seems to be a preacher's declaration supported by the wealth effect, and other values have not yet been reflected.

"Juan doesn't understand Chinese miners"

"Hu An really wants to do business. Chinese investors just want to collect money. If miners dig a lot of coins and sell them to make a fortune, will they still work well in the future?" In the discussion of Filecoin economic model design, A miner surnamed Lu piggybacked on the official team to express some recognition of the founder Juan.

But despite this, the miner still has some concerns. "Maybe Juan is more inclined to network security, but other factors are not ruled out. After all, people are unpredictable. I think the government should first satisfy the miners, then the market, and then the market. investor."

Due to a series of issues such as the 1.5 million FIL flowing into the market since then, more and more doubts have emerged in the public opinion environment, such as why the test currency has become a real currency, and the official dictatorship.

The official member WHY also explained: "As early as 2017, this part of the currency (2.5%) was reserved for the purpose of resisting the impact of FIL after FIL goes online. Exchange price manipulation will have FIL impact. This is a market stabilization plan. This plan has become an industry standard. These plans attract companies to provide liquidity and stability to the market in the early post-issuance period (risk of price fluctuations)."

But this still seems to lack credibility. "Although Juan’s IPFS is very impressive, the Filecoin economic model has problems. Early investors and official coins can be thrown into the market at any time to affect the stable operation of the economic system. Various pledges and releases of locked positions are not Safe storage is good, but in terms of economic balance, it's just a mess." said a miner named Voldemort in the Slack community.

In fact, this shows to a certain extent that although Chinese miners do not have much contact with Juan, they often define him as dictators and geeks. In the course of the game, most people still speculate about Juan from the perspective of human nature, but compared to these, Juan seems to have no knowledge of Chinese miners.

"The mining community is great. Thousands of people around the world use Filecoin. Most of the people I meet are down to earth and are usually very friendly. They are competitive and support each other, just like good Web3 participants. That way, only a few bad guys try to abuse the mechanism and try to create problems for profit.”

It is not difficult to find that Juan output through a large number of speeches. On the one hand, it is to recharge the belief of miners and investors. On the other hand, it means that he may indeed not understand Chinese miners, or he is unwilling to compromise for the interests of Chinese miners.

In the course of Filecoin's development over the years, Juan has always been known for his straightforwardness and idealism. For example, Juan said in a video speech at the Shenzhen IPFS Industry Development Conference in 2019 that the official has not cooperated with any individual or organization in China so far, and it is not recommended to purchase any mining hardware. The official mining hardware specification has not been released. This is equivalent to a direct blow to the raging Filecoin mining machine sales, causing a lot of dissatisfaction with Filecoin ecological partners.

In April of this year, Juan was still angering Justin Sun’s acquisition of BitTorrent on Twitter. He said that he recognized BitTorrent’s previous technology and team, but did not recognize Justin Sun and BitTorrent under his leadership. Since then, the two have forged a son, so that when Filecoin encounters difficulties in the later development of Filecoin, Justin Sun always occasionally "speaks righteously."

In this huge interest game, with such a sharp and straightforward voice from Juan, it seems not difficult to understand why Filecoin has fallen into a "fork door" and why various opinion genres are generated in the Slack community.

Juan and his leading Filecoin are standing at the crossroads of ideals and reality. Faced with the contradiction between how to incentivize old miners and how to attract new miners to the market caused by the price of FIL, which path and direction will they choose? What kind of future is still a huge unknown.

。END 。

WeChat picture_20190715215105_copy.jpg