On December 17, Filecoin officially released the Lotus v1.3.0 version according to the FIP-0009 proposal. This upgrade mainly exempts the basic fee for successfully submitting a time-space proof (SubmitWindowedPoSt) message. To a certain extent, this can reduce the cost of miners to maintain computing power and mining.
The fundamental reason for this upgrade is that the gas cost of the network has risen, and the cost of adding and maintaining computing power for miners is too high. Many miners have stopped adding new computing power and even lost computing power.
1.1 The gas cost of new computing power remains high
Since mid-November, the gas fee of Filecoin mining has remained high, which is the biggest factor that bothers miners to increase computing power. To encapsulate a sector, two messages, ProveCommitSector and PreCommitSector, need to be sent to the verification node, and a gas fee is required to send the message.
Judging from the current data, to add 1TiB effective computing power, the required gas fee is: (0.1923+0.0732)*32=8.528 FIL. Based on the current single TiB output, it will take about 58 days for the revenue to remain flat.
2.2 The cost of computing power maintenance should not be underestimated
After the effective computing power is added, it does not end. According to Filecoin's space-time proof mechanism, it is necessary to continuously submit space-time proofs after sector encapsulation is completed to ensure continuous and effective data storage. Therefore, each sector also needs to continuously send SubmitWindowedPoSt messages to the verification node every day.
From the current data, the gas fee for daily maintenance of 1TiB computing power is: 1.4231 /2349*32=0.01938FIL. And now the single TiB mining revenue is 0.1447FIL, and it is still declining at a rate of about 0.8% per day, so the continuous and uninterrupted cost of this part can be imagined.
Therefore, this upgrade and adjustment will cancel the cost of successfully submitting the time-space proof. In the case that the network throughput and verification cost problems cannot be solved, it can intuitively reduce the mining cost. V:BBKX008 Learn more about the latest information on Filecoin.
In the FIP-0009 proposal, it is officially stated that eliminating the gas fee for successfully submitting a time-space certificate is only a short-term stopgap measure, and cannot be used as a final means to reduce network resource consumption.
It can be seen from the Filecoin block explorer that the gas fee for submitting the time-space proof message only accounts for 1.5% of the total gas burning of the entire network. This proposal cannot fundamentally solve the problem of excessive gas costs.
But we don’t have to be pessimistic. In view of the gas cost issue, several proposals "FIPS42, FIPS49, FIPS50" have been drafted, which are expected to further reduce the long-term cost of WindowPoSt and reduce the long-term congestion of the chain, just because these solutions are more work-intensive. Large, requires a lot of development and testing, so it takes a certain amount of time.
Finally, what we need to know is that Filecoin is currently in its early stages, problems continue to appear, official and community teams are also constantly solving, and everything is developing in a good direction.