Filecoin's encryption and economic mechanisms are combined to align participants with the goals and mission of the network. Filecoin motivates participants with block rewards and storage order rewards. However, when participants deviate from their commitment to the network, sharply reducing their revenue is the main form of mitigating bad behavior.
Slashing uses game theory and decision science to help solve one of the most important challenges facing decentralized storage networks like Filecoin. In the absence of centralized control, Filecoin needs a built-in way to ensure the integrity of the network and adjust the incentives of its participants. If there are miners seeking to maximize their personal interests at the expense of the broader Filecoin ecosystem, then slashing can curb this behavior by imposing fines on the miners. For any miner participating in Filecoin, the most rational choice is always It is to act in good faith to maintain the network.
How does slashing work
Every miner who provides storage capacity to the network must use Filecoin as collateral. If any miner's negligence or malicious behavior, will be "cut", or forced to confiscate part of their collateral. After all, the reputation and reliability of the network are threatened. In this way, sharp cuts will bring bad economic incentives to miners, thereby preventing bad behaviors of miners.
Therefore, Slashing is a built-in incentive mechanism that keeps all miners on the Filecoin network honest and reliable. Miners will have to perform well or they may lose Filecoin collateral and storage capacity.
When will slashing happen
In three cases, Filecoin miners may be cut. these are:
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When the miner deletes the data before the storage transaction expires (the contract expires).
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When a miner fails to submit his proof of time and space as required (storage errors will be greatly reduced).
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When a miner tries to fork the Filecoin blockchain or manipulate elections (consensus reduction).
In each case, miners cannot act in a way that fulfills their promises to the network, so the miners’ revenue should be cut.
Slashing of transaction failure
Miners store data in storage partitions called "sectors" on the Filecoin network. In each sector, miners can sign warehousing transaction contracts with customers and provide transaction collateral to ensure that transactions will be well maintained. The agreement requires the provision of minimum transaction collateral at the basic level of guarantee. If the transaction is terminated, the collateral will be significantly reduced.
However, miners can provide higher transaction guarantees, which means providing a higher level of service and reliability to potential customers.
The Filecoin network expects that miners will continuously store customers’ files for a set time determined by their storage contract: miners are responsible for keeping all sectors online and continuously available until the end of the contract period. Miners may not be able to meet this expectation, either by defaulting before the contract expires, or by ignoring the continuous storage of customer data as promised.
There are two ways to indicate that the miner has breached the contract: by taking the committed storage sector offline before the end of the contract, or by voluntarily terminating the contract early.
Miners who voluntarily terminate the contract need to pay a termination fee. Miners whose storage sectors cannot remain online will be reduced; they will be automatically confiscated part of the Filecoin collateral and reduce storage capacity.
Storage failure slashing
As mentioned in the previous article, Filecoin uses an encryption protocol (proof system) to verify the storage behavior performed by miners for the network and ensure that miners provide storage as promised. Part of the proof system is Filecoin's unique Proof of Time (PoSt), which sends out a random encryption challenge (WindoPoSt) to miners every day. Only when miners can query the customer data they promised to store can they answer the challenge. Verify that they are indeed providing storage.
The Filecoin protocol considers miners who fail WindowPoSt to be in a faulty state. This indicates that the miner has lost storage capacity in finding and finding faulty sectors. Miners can only restore their sector storage capacity after successfully responding to subsequent WindowPoSt.
However, if the miner maintains this state for two consecutive days, the storage failure fee will be reduced every day. After all, Filecoin will only incentivize reliable and useful storage, and for storage clients, it is important to know that all data is reliably stored on Filecoin. If a sector reaches the maximum allowed consecutive failure days, all rewards and initial pledged collateral obtained by the sector will be reduced.
Slashing of consensus errors
The blocks on the Filecoin blockchain are arranged by height. At each height, miners participate in leader elections to determine who will mine the next block of the Filecoin blockchain and receive block rewards. The leader is selected based on the Filecoin miner pool selected for its storage capacity. The protocol for conducting leader elections is called Expected Consensus (EC).
In the leader election, each miner will draw a random seed provided by Drand Beacon. Then, the miner performs the election proof function on the random seed. If the value generated by the election proof function is valid, the miner is eligible to mine. When miners generate new blocks during the EC period, these blocks will come together to form a "reminder set", which is a family of blocks mined in the same period and connected to the same parent block in the previous period.
Filecoin's EC is unique in that many miners can win the leader election: at each height, different miners can generate multiple valid blocks at once. In order to avoid the Filecoin blockchain from splitting or "forking" into multiple competing chains, miners must agree that the normative or real blockchain is the blockchain with the heaviest hint set, that is, the hint set with the most blocks in history.
The defect of consensus lies in mining two different blocks at the same height. When this happens, the miner’s storage will be temporarily suspended and will be punished.
Unlike storage failures and contract break failures, other miners in the Filecoin network must report consensus failures. In this case, slashing will not be performed automatically, but Filecoin miners have an incentive to report consensus errors.
in conclusion
The Filecoin network uses slashing to generate powerful economic incentives for miners' misconduct. Since misbehaving miners will always bear the loss of their collateral and storage capacity, there is no good reason for miners to ignore or damage the Filecoin network. In this way, slashing helps customers be confident that miners will store their data exactly as promised. Therefore, slashing is a feature of the Filecoin protocol that protects the integrity, reliability and reputation of the Filecoin ecosystem.
Investors who want to learn more about IPFS and Filecoin can follow the official website of the IPFS Chinese community: http://ipfs.cn and the official website of Space Cloud Technology: http://yunos.io