Filecoin home mining feasibility

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At present, the mining rights of filecoin are basically in the hands of several large mining pools, and the large mining pools will try their best to promote the difficulty of mining filecoin. However, the design of filecoin's own mining mechanism hopes to be decentralized and has certain requirements for the machine, but it is not unattainable. Compared with the current Bitcoin mining market dominated by ASICs, Filecoin can do home mining with a little investment on the original machine. The only relatively high requirement is that the machine needs to be online for a long time. This article will explain a few issues that everyone is particularly concerned about. Most of the content in this article is taken from the official English document of filecoin. Please point out if there are any explanations that are incorrect.

Overview of mining mechanism

Filecore's mining mechanism is very different from the mechanism that uses computing power such as Bitcoin, and it mainly uses storage capacity as a proof of work.
Storage miner : Responsible for providing storage capacity on the network. This type of miners obtain incentives (obtain block rewards and transaction fees) by providing storage, and need to prove their effective storage in accordance with the designed mechanism during the life cycle.
Retrieval miner (retrieval miner) : Similar to the intermediary role between the end user's data access requirements and the specific storage layer, it provides a pipeline for the entire network. Earn rewards by winning storage and retrieval contracts.
Repair miner (repair miner) : Not yet implemented

According to personal understanding (including most of the official documents), it should be mainly aimed at storage miners. The reason should be that the current entire network is mainly garbage data, and there is not much demand for data retrieval.

Mining hardware requirements

The part of the machine that everyone cares about most. Since the entire mining algorithm contains multiple steps, the official opinion is that all the steps can be run on one machine, or different tasks can be shared on multiple machines to form a pipeline. There is no doubt that under the condition of sufficient budget, it is definitely more conducive to mining efficiency to equip multiple machines.

In addition, the mining efficiency of the machine configuration has a lot to do with the sector. Currently 32GB is used on the mainnet and testnets. The nominal size of a mine is 64GB sectors, which is more efficient. I don't understand very well how to match 32GB sectors with network configuration.

The following is the official list, assuming that all tasks are running on one machine.

CPU: 8 cores, support SHA instruction (Intel, AMD do not pay attention to it).
DRAM: 128 GB, with 256 GB swap partition on NVMe SSD.
GPU: Note that GPU is not required, but recommended, general home GPU is fine.
Hard Disk: 1 TB NVMe SSD

We can see that compared to the high-end configuration of ordinary home machines, the biggest possibility that really needs to be upgraded is the memory. At present, the price of one 32 GB memory is about 1200 RMB, and the investment for four is about RMB 5000. If Optane persistent memory technology is popularized, the price should fall sharply under the same memory capacity.

bonus system

Currently, most miners receive two reward mechanisms: storage fees and block rewards.

Storage costs : Storage costs arise when certain data needs to be retrieved, just like when we take files from a cloud disk. At present, because there are fewer applications, there should be less storage costs.

Block reward : It is the main source of mining rewards, similar to the reward concept of Bitcoin mining. Belongs to the main source of rewards for miners.

Punishment mechanism (slashing)

The most important thing is last. The so-called filecoin has high requirements for machines. I think the most important thing is that it has designed a penalty machine for verifying nodes online, which has high requirements for stability. First of all, it is necessary to understand that every miner will claim and maintain at least one sector and promise the time to maintain the sector. The minimum time currently officially given is 6 months. In other words, within 6 months, you need to keep the machine in a normal operating state as much as possible, otherwise you will be punished. There are three main types of current punishment mechanisms:

Sector fault fee (sector fault fee) : In the network mechanism, each node is checked every day if it is online (the guessing time should be random). If the node goes offline, the fine will be deducted from the wallet. The daily fine is probably slightly more than the expected daily income (the official did not say how much more). If the node is offline for two consecutive weeks, a termination fee will be deducted and the node will be removed from the network.

Sector fault detection fee (sector fault detection fee ): This is a one-time penalty fee when a node is found to be down and there is a fault, and the fee is about the expected income of a few days. The author understands that this should be superimposed with the above sector failure penalty, but this is a one-time charge (that is, it will be charged once for three consecutive days), but it should be charged every time a failure occurs.

Sector termination fee : Sectors can actively or passively terminate and exit the network before the contract is full. In either case, a termination fee needs to be paid. The fee is theoretically equal to all the benefits of the current contract, but at most a penalty fee equal to 90 days of benefits will be charged.

It can be seen that if home mining cannot guarantee that the machine is online 24 hours a day, or if the machine fails within 6 months, due to its stricter punishment for the existence of the machine, it may be tricky. In addition to the previous hardware investment, this aspect Still need to pay special attention to consideration.

Reference materials
https://docs.filecoin.io/

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Origin blog.csdn.net/figowu10/article/details/114077606