Bizai Research Institute: Filecoin's Fork Dilemma and Future Prospects
1. Summary
1. Summary
There has never been a star project like Filecoin. A week before the mainnet launch, there were teams hoping to fork Filecoin, and a week after the mainnet launch, various fork announcements broke out. Why, as a king-level project of the distributed storage competition, the Filecoin community is so contradictory and constantly trying to split? The opposition of the miners to the Filecoin economic model has been escalating, and even a joint strike to protest?
This article mainly from the perspective of Filecoin fork, respectively expounds the introduction of Filecoin, the different propositions of the current emerging Filecoin fork projects, the reasons for the fork, and the future prospects, in order to try to analyze the interests and logic behind the fork of Filecoin , which aims to help everyone see clearly the suspicion of Filecoin fork and avoid being disturbed by the disturbing information.
2. Introduction to Filecoin
Filecoin is currently a star project in the decentralized storage track. It was born out of the famous point-to-point hypermedia transmission protocol IPFS, and is committed to realizing a decentralized storage service that everyone can participate in and benefit from through the token economy. platform. That is to say, IPFS is a coinless decentralized storage protocol that everyone can use for free; Filecoin is a coin-based decentralized protocol, through Filecoin token incentives, everyone can actively participate in becoming a storage service provider, and then achieve decentralized storage services the goal of.
To put it simply, Filecoin is a tokenized distributed storage network developed based on the IPFS protocol, and the development team of Filecoin is the original team of the original IPFS protocol [Protocol Labs].
According to the data of the Filecoin block explorer Flyfox Browser, as of now, the computing power of Filecoin's entire network is as high as 619.76PiB, the number of active miners is 556, the overall circulation of FIL tokens is 14,024,265 FIL, and the latest price is 24.44 USD/FIL.
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Image source: Flying Fox Browser
3. The fork dilemma of Filecoin
Contrary to the public's strong expectations, Filecoin has experienced many turmoil and twists and turns, especially for Filecoin's token economic model, the community and miners, and even industry opinion leaders have criticized it, such as the high mining cost. The amount of pre-staking forces miners to go to the secondary market to purchase in order to obtain mining qualifications. For example, the Filecoin obtained through mining cannot be unlocked immediately, but can only be unlocked linearly within 180 days.
The price of Filecoin can also reflect that the current community is divided on the development prospects of this king-level project. Only five days after the mainnet was launched, the price of Filecoin’s token FIL dropped from $200 to $30, a retracement of nearly 70%.
So far, there are three forked projects with complete information that can be counted (as shown in the table below), and we will introduce them in detail one by one. By investigating the forked projects of Filecoin, we found that they have one thing in common: they all choose to modify the economic model or technical parameters to ensure the interests of the miners. For example, they will cancel the pre-stake and modify the incentive method of Filecoin wait.
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1）FileStar
Source: BitZ Research Institute
FileStar, whose Chinese name is Wenquxing, officially released a white paper on October 20, 2020, announcing the fork of Filecoin. So far, the main network of the project has not yet been officially launched. It plans to open the source code on October 30 and launch the main network. The vision of the FileStar project is more ambitious than Filecoin. In addition to focusing on distributed storage technology, it also hopes to conduct layout and research in distributed cloud computing and broadband incentive networks.
Compared with Filecoin, FileStar has made the following modifications and adjustments:
cancellation of pre-mortgage;
Implement the new P1 encapsulation algorithm to improve encapsulation efficiency;
Introduce recursive zero-knowledge proof technology to realize the off-chain aggregation of messages and improve the TPS of the entire network;
In Window PoST, VRF random spot check technology is introduced to reduce the number of spot checks by miners;
2) Filecash
In addition to incentives for proof of storage, incentives for storage resources, computing resources, and bandwidth resources will also be gradually realized.
At the "Third China (Xiamen) International Blockchain + Business Future Development Summit" sub-session, Han Weiping, chairman of MIX Group, officially announced 7 major problems in the development of Filecoin and the idea of forking Filecoin.
According to Lianwen’s report on Han Weiping’s speech, Han believes that the development of Filecoin is facing some major problems, which are listed as follows:
File Hash value calculation is not friendly to Intel storage instruction set;
The sealing process is complicated and consumes too much computing resources;
Low TPS limits the development of the number of network nodes;
The pre-mortgage is too high, which is beneficial to investors and not conducive to miners;
The official data set restricts the use of the storage network, and the data security is not high;
frequent major technical changes;
The blockchain economic model is unreasonable.
Furthermore, according to the above-mentioned problems, Han officially released the solution of the Filecoin fork project Filecoin Cash:
The SHA256 algorithm is upgraded to SHA512;
The 11-layer serial sealing calculation is reduced to 5 layers;
Increase Layer 2 to improve TPS, support a wide range of applications such as smart contracts, and a market economy where the network scale can rapidly expand;
Dynamic pre-mortgage to fully release the income to miners;
Private data is determined by the individual to determine whether it is valid and fully democratic, while public data needs to be audited, free and redundant;
Joint development and governance with the community, full democracy against dictatorship;
Improve economic models.
3) Filecoin Vision
Filecoin Cash has opened the Github code base on September 19, and opened the test network simultaneously, and plans to launch the main network in October.
On September 18, the anonymous team published the article "Filecoin Vision Manifesto" on GitHub, announcing the birth of the Filecoin fork project Filecoin Vision. The "Filecoin Vision Manifesto" pointed out that the current Filecoin project has the following six problems:
The share that can be mined has dropped from 70% to about 30% at the beginning of the main network;
Pre-mortgage and post-block reward linear release;
Window PoSt fails within half an hour, resulting in token penalties, and must be repaired the next day;
The committed data verified by the verifier has 10 times the storage power;
Protocol Labs tends to use ethics to constrain the behavior of miners, rather than on-chain rules;
Protocol Labs owns 15% of the tokens and the Foundation owns 5%;
Based on the above problems, Filecoin Vision specifically proposed the following solutions:
Reduce the pre-mortgage amount and lower the mining threshold;
The share that can be mined is increased to 99%;
Window PoSt allows lenient retrying of commits;
If the Garbage sector is lost or disconnected, there will be no penalty for the pledged currency;
Tolerant punishment, the implementation of punishment must be to determine malicious behavior and never excessive punishment;
Malicious behavior that cannot be well identified through the rules on the chain will never be punished;
Penalties will be predetermined but deferred to avoid a domino reaction;
No validators, no verified commitment data;
Advocate morality, but tend to rationalize the rules on the chain, and do not exclude human selfishness;
4. Reasons for the fork of Filecoin
1) The economic model has greatly hurt the miner community
Miners continue to propose fork projects, essentially because the economic model of Filecoin is more harmful to the interests of miners. In particular, the pledge mechanism requirements in the Filecoin economic model not only make it impossible for the miners to fully unlock the mined FIL tokens, but also make the miners the largest taker in the secondary market.
According to official documents, Filecoin's mortgage mechanism is divided into two parts, namely block reward pledge and pre-mortgage.
As the name implies, the block reward pledge means that the tokens mined by the miners cannot be distributed to the miners immediately, but must be unlocked linearly within 180 days, so the miners need to wait 180 days to get all the mining rewards. This makes it impossible for miners to quickly obtain tokens from the first day of mining. Although this design is conducive to controlling the secondary market selling pressure of FIL tokens, it also prevents miners from quickly obtaining tokens to make up for miners' expenditures. Especially when the price of FIL has dropped significantly.
According to Flyfox browser data, the current pledge amount required for a sector (32GB) is 0.1932FIL, then 1T needs about 6.04FIL, and the mining income of 1TB in 24 hours is 0.2FIL, and it needs to be linear within 180 days Unlocking, obviously this one is not conducive to the ledger of small and medium miners.
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Image source: Flying Fox browser
Therefore, the pledge mechanism of Filecoin makes miners enter a vicious circle: the 180-day mining income unlocking period prevents miners from obtaining enough tokens in the early stage, which can only cause miners to go to the secondary market to buy coins for more pre-payment Pledge to increase computing power, but the 180-day unlocking period makes the daily mining income unable to make up for the high daily cost, and makes miners have to sell coins without participating in packaging, and there are not enough tokens to participate in the previous If you set a pledge, you will continue to be eliminated by big miners.
It is precisely because of the economic model of Filecoin that the interests of the miners are greatly affected, so the miners continue to propose forked projects to protect their own interests. Therefore, to a certain extent, forking Filecoin is also a helpless choice for miners.
2) High threshold and high cost of mining
In addition to the fact that the economic model has greatly harmed the interests of the miners, the high threshold and high cost of Filecoin mining also make it difficult for the miners to let go. Filecoin has established a relatively severe punishment mechanism for miners to ensure the stability of the miner group and prevent miners from doing evil.
The SDR algorithm enabled by Filecoin adopts the Window PoSt scheme in the space-time proof part, which puts extremely high requirements on the stability of miners. According to the rules, miners need to check all the sectors on the chain in each space-time certification cycle. If the check fails, the computing power will be punished. Not only that, if the miner fails to submit the space-time proof within 24 hours, the miner's computing power may be directly cleared, and the pre-staked tokens will also be fined.
Therefore, Filecoin has a strict mechanism for miners. Miners must be very cautious, improve professionalism and operation and maintenance costs, ensure the stability of mining machine operation, and avoid the tragic situation of zero computing power. Behind all of this is the high cost of miners in IDC computer rooms, power guarantee, network stability, storage hardware and other aspects.
In this case, it is difficult for small and medium-sized miners to resist the corresponding risks, and they do not have rich funds to invest in improving stability. Therefore, this invisibly sets a relatively high cost for Filecoin mining. Ordinary mining machines There is simply no way to break even. However, due to the reverse elimination based on the high threshold, only a few big miners at the top have obtained more than 70% of the mining revenue, and the survival status of most small and medium miners is extremely poor.
The current mining situation is undoubtedly contrary to the vision of "everyone participates" mentioned in Filecoin's white paper. This is another important reason why miners want to fork Filecoin. They hope that the fork project can take care of the interests of small and medium-sized miners, lower the mining threshold, and realize the real distributed storage of "everyone participates and everyone shares".
3) Bifurcation Economics
In addition to some problems encountered during the operation of the Filecoin project, the interest behind the fork is also an important reason why everyone is willing to fork Filecoin. After all, if the forked Filecoin project is successful, based on 10% of the expected market value, it will be about 1 billion US dollars. What's more, the cost paid is nothing more than changing some codes and then doing marketing. Compared to the expected benefits of the fork, the cost is simply too low.
A thing with such a high ROI can truly meet the interests of miners, so it is no longer surprising that there are so many forked projects on the market in such a short period of time. After all, there are many successful fork cases for reference, such as BCH fork BTC, BSV fork BCH, ETC fork ETH, etc. If the result of the fork is good, fame and fortune will be gained; if the result of the fork is not good, what can be lost? Maybe this is the real consideration behind everyone's willingness to fork Filecoin.
5. Future development prospect
As a star project of distributed storage, Filecoin carries the hope of realizing distributed storage in the industry. However, due to the token economic model, the interest demands of the miners' group have been damaged, and there has been a fierce conflict between the miners' group and the project party. There are even scenes of collective strikes by miners. It is conceivable that with the development of the project in the future, the scene of the game between the miner group and the project party may reappear. Once it reaches a critical point where the contradictions cannot be reconciled, new forces will promote the fork of the Filecoin project.
