Although the mainnet has been online for more than three months, there are still many newcomers who don’t know Filecoin deeply. I hope that the reviewer can compare the differences and differences between BTC, ETH, and Filecoin at a shallow level.
issued
BTC: The total number of Bitcoins is 21 million, and a block is generated every 10 minutes. The generation of each block is accompanied by the generation of Bitcoin rewards. The reward is 50 Bitcoins. Every 210,000 blocks are accompanied by a block. The bitcoin rewards generated will be halved. The most recent time was on May 12, 2020. Each block was rewarded with 6.25 bitcoins; all bitcoins will be issued in 2140, that is, halved every 3.99 years (=4).
ETH: In 2014, when Ethereum was born, it used the concept of crowdfunding to raise ether. Between July and August of 2014, approximately 72 million ether was issued for crowdfunding. These coins are sometimes referred to as "pre-mine". After the crowdfunding phase, the annual amount of ether production is limited to 25% of 72 million. The implication is that there is no upper limit to the total amount of ETH.
Filecoin: The total amount of FIL is 2 billion, and the storage can be mined 55%, that is, 1.1 billion, and will never be issued. Every message in the Filecoin network needs to pay network tax (GAS) and be directly destroyed. The pledge mechanism adopted by Filecoin and a 75% reward of 180 antenna releases, coupled with baseline release and simple release, the complex economic model has brought great potential for vigorous development of ecological and commercial applications.
Mining
Both BTC and ETH are based on the PoW algorithm to achieve their consensus mechanism. The more popular point is to buy mining machines, perform cumbersome and complex hash calculations to obtain rewards, and then determine the currency distribution based on the amount of calculation consumed.
Summary: The mining method is also called energy-consuming mining, which consumes a lot of energy resources to obtain tokens BTC and ETH.
Filecoin's consensus mechanism is expected consensus. The main proof mechanism inside is Proof-of-Spacetime, the full name is Proof-of-Spacetime, which is (storage) proof of space and time, instead of proof of work PoW.
In the Filecoin system, the miner completes the storage, and the user confirms that the miner completes the storage. Here, "confirm that the miner completes the storage" is the Filecoin consensus mechanism (PoSt). This "confirm that the miner completes the storage" is to continuously submit information to the network and communicate to the network The information that users store with me has always existed, and this is proof of time and space.
Summary: Filecoin mining is to invest storage space (hard disk) and bandwidth resources to obtain token FIL, also known as contribution mining.
category
BTC pioneered the development of blockchain 1.0. Its high degree of decentralization and scarcity gave BTC a golden attribute, which is known as digital gold.
ETH created a precedent for smart contracts, known as Blockchain 2.0. In the industry, it is generally believed that the big bull market in the digital currency market in 2017 was led by ETH.
IPFS&Filecoin solves the problems of high storage cost, low storage efficiency, and cross-chain difficulties in the blockchain. Known as Blockchain 3.0, the combination of innovative consensus mechanism and IPFS has opened a new window for the decentralized market. As the IPFS incentive layer, storage projects are considered to set off a huge wave in the future, and IPFS may become Building the cornerstone of the next-generation Internet, and the decentralized storage market built by Filecoin will be an important support.
application
Bitcoin's position in the blockchain market is unshakable, but the technical requirements applied in real life are not obvious.
Ethereum expands the application field of blockchain and provides reliable computing smart contracts to lay the foundation for blockchain development and make up for some market deficiencies. However, the Ethereum 2.0 era has not yet been completed, and the huge benefits of specific business areas in the future have not yet been comprehensive achieve.
After Filecoin went live, it has reached cooperation with many blockchain projects. Blockchain projects such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and Ontology have all begun to connect with IPFS and Filecoin. At present, Filecoin's large file storage expands the foundation of blockchain development, especially supporting DApp. Filecoin, which is regarded as the foundation of blockchain and Web3.0, directly points to the trillion-level storage market, and the demand for the scale of the cloud storage market in the future will be very huge.
The reason why Filecoin is so valued is that its application value is rooted in the market. In the Internet era, some people say that data is like life on the blockchain, storage is land, code is law, scoring is morality, and computing power is power. Looking at it this way, the Filecoin network is the "land in the blockchain", and it is also expected to become the infrastructure for storing data in the blockchain and the "carrier" of the blockchain.
At present, Filecoin has been launched on the main network and is running stably, and its storage capacity has exceeded 2EB. However, Filecoin has a long way to go to store real data. The real data market has left Filecoin a lot of test, and only to cross this hurdle. , The officially promoted "economic model" can begin to enter the positive track, truly solve the problem of privatization of user privacy, and change the way the world accesses data on the Internet.
Concluding remarks
Blockchain is an extension and application of cryptography, but its fatal weakness is that its ability to carry data is too small. Today, when the era of 5G, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things is coming, market data is growing rapidly, and existing technologies are not enough to support the rapid growth of data. Therefore, IPFS/Filecoin fills this gap and brings great vitality to the blockchain. And development.
The current key value of Filecoin lies in its economic model, and in the future it will be commercial implementation rather than the currency price in the secondary market. Some people comment that Filecoin is a game between miners and commercial economy. In this process, there will be conflicts and stumbling, and finally it will mature. Therefore, in the entire process, investors need to adjust their psychological expectations to wait for the real value to land.