Jun Lu from Huobi University: Decoding the Decentralization Mechanism of Filecoin Economy
Huobi University Huobi Education
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Huobi University Huobi Education
foreword
In Huobi University's "Famous Teacher Frontier Course", Lu Jun, a senior researcher at Huobi Research Institute, discussed the decentralization mechanism of the Filecoin economy with students. It said that Filecoin's encrypted economic system is actually absorbing the underlying ideas of the two consensus mechanisms of PoW and PoS. Filecoin proposes proof of replication and proof of time and space. The core reason is to prevent miners from cheating in the process of mining with data stored on the hard disk. Simply put, data is only stored when participating in the mining process, and will be deleted if you do not participate.
Lu Jun said that Filecoin currently has several major challenges, namely: 1. Short-term network goals and conflicting interests of participants; 2. Disadvantages in storage costs and efficiency; 3. Algorithms and models restrict many miners from participating in ecological construction. In the future, if Filecoin wants to build a safe, reliable and competitive distributed storage economy, it needs to encourage more miners to participate in ecological construction.
Mentor background
Lu Jun is a senior researcher at Huobi Research Institute. Huobi Blockchain Application Research Institute (referred to as "Huobi Research Institute") was established in April 2016. Since March 2018, it has been committed to comprehensively expanding research and exploration in various fields of blockchain, with a view to pan-blockchain As the research object, the research objectives are to accelerate the research and development of blockchain technology, promote the application of blockchain industry, and promote the ecological optimization of blockchain industry. The main research contents include industry trends, technical paths, application innovation, Pattern Exploration, etc. In line with the principles of public welfare, rigor, and innovation, Huobi Research Institute will carry out extensive and in-depth cooperation with governments, enterprises, universities and other institutions through various forms, and build a research platform covering the complete industrial chain of the blockchain. Industry professionals provide a solid theoretical foundation and trend judgment to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the entire blockchain industry.
The following is the essence of Lu Jun’s courses, organized by Huobi University as follows:
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Filecoin encryption economy: the combination of PoW and PoS ideas
Since the birth of Bitcoin, blockchain projects have been focusing on underlying mining, gradually improving the level of blockchain decentralization. As a public chain, Filecoin also proposed its own decentralization mechanism: a mining mechanism based on storage computing power. This set of mechanism has been developed by the protocol room for three years. The protocol laboratory has invested a lot of time and energy in the innovation and development of the mechanism. People in the industry have paid special attention to the mechanism of the entire project, including innovation.
The ideological source of the Filecoin project comes from the two consensus mechanisms of POW and POS. I think its entire encrypted economic system is actually a collection of POW and POS, combining the two consensus economies and underlying ideas, but it has made a relatively complicated design to achieve this.
In terms of Filecoin's economic system, the POW aspect is mainly the replication proof and space-time proof it proposes, which are its two mechanisms. The core reason why it proposes these two mechanisms is to prevent miners from using the data stored on the hard disk to cheat during the mining process. Simply put, data is only stored when participating in the mining process, and will be deleted if you do not participate.
Therefore, from the perspective of the entire consensus of Filecoin, I think it is a combination of these two ideas.
Specifically, Filecoin miners also do some very complicated calculations on the network, and use this calculation result as proof of their workload. Its workload is actually two very core functions behind the entire network. One is VDF (Verifiable Random Function), and the other is zkSnarks (Zero-Knowledge Proof). The calculations of these two functions exist in large quantities in the entire mining process of miners.
In the Filecoin economy, on the one hand, miners do contribute computing power resources to maintain the security of the entire network, and the system will give them incentives. On the other hand, miners also directly reach orders with users to obtain part of the storage income.
secondary titleFilecoin mining model design: multi-miner role participation, two core indicators
In fact, in the Filecoin mining system, there are multiple miner roles, but now everyone pays more attention to storage miners. The miners of Filecoin can be divided into the following four categories:1. Storage miners:
Storage transactions, mining rewards, network gas. The Filecoin network must first accumulate storage capacity; on the one hand, storage miners earn income by providing storage space, and on the other hand, they participate in mining to obtain rewards; finally, there is also the transaction gas fee in each round of block packaging, which is actually Part of it will be given to the miners, but not all of it will be given to the miners.2. Maintenance miners:
Detect sector failures of miners and make network broadcasts. In the process of Filecoin mining, there are often problems with disk storage facilities being damaged. For example, if the hard disk is broken or there are bad spots in the sector, the network cannot be produced. This may cause data loss. Maintenance miners often go to the network to check and broadcast the situation to the system. After receiving it, the system will notify the miner with the problem and ask him to recover the sector within the specified time. If it cannot be recovered, it will be defined as a failure. If a failure occurs, a part of the mortgage fee of the storage miner will be deducted.3. Retrieve miners:
4. Application miners:
B/C-oriented application layer development. The application miner is based on the ecological development of Filecoin for B-end and C-end users, because there is no storage client entrance for the user end, and now you want to upload files to Filecoin, it is a secret bank, but there is no formed client yet The product comes out.
For Filecoin mining equipment, refer to the official benchmark mining machine configuration. The mining machine hardware includes CPU, GPU, memory, SSD and hard disk. Simply put, it is an enterprise-level server. It is a high-end enterprise-level server plus hard disk, which is not a threshold Very tall large mining rigs. In addition to the hardware, Filecoin mining is more about testing the professional hosting operation and maintenance and technical optimization capabilities of miners. The core elements of Filecoin mining are high-speed bandwidth, 24h power supply stability, dust-free environment and cluster scheduling (non-machine superposition). It is not free to turn on/off like Bitcoin mining. It needs to complete the copying of data and accept the random challenge of space-time proof. Tokens are forfeited. Therefore, mining machines generally need to be hosted in professional IDC computer rooms, and professional parties provide equipment operation and maintenance and technical services (cluster algorithm).
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Encapsulation speed of key indicators of Filecoin mining
The encapsulation speed (GB/h) represents the data storage speed in the proof-of-replication phase of PoRep, which can be used to calculate the basic indicators for evaluating mining machines, such as the daily effective storage of the mining machine, the encapsulation speed per 10,000 yuan invested, and the time required to fill up the storage space. We can see the importance of packaging speed from several equations:
Daily effective storage of mining machine = packaging speed (GB/h)*24h
Cost performance of the whole machine = packaging speed / (selling price - hard disk cost)
Hard disk full storage time = hard disk size / effective daily storage * 1024
Mining theoretical daily currency production = accumulated effective storage / effective storage of the entire network * daily currency production of the entire network
Effective storage is the basis of the computing power of Filecoin miners, which determines the probability of block generation and is closely related to the packaging speed. Considering the impact of mining machine prices and hard disk capacity, the mining machine with high cost performance, large daily effective storage capacity, and short time-consuming to fully store the hard disk is the most comprehensive. excellent. The packaging speed also affects the mining revenue by affecting the ratio of the effective storage (storage capacity) of the mining machine to the effective storage of the entire network.
Filecoin mining key indicators single-sector mortgage amount (Fil/32GB)
Filecoin mining has added a mortgage mechanism. Miners who participate in storage mining must lock a certain amount of FIL as collateral when performing mining work. According to the official Filecoin mortgage document, the miner’s mortgage amount formula is as follows:
Miner mortgage amount = miner computing power mortgage amount + miner storage mortgage amount
Miner's storage power mortgage amount = Fil circulation * computing power mortgage ratio * miner's computing power and the entire network computing power
Among them, the computing power mortgage ratio and storage mortgage ratio are officially adjusted parameters, which are defined as M and V respectively, M=0.3, V=0.05.
Therefore, we can infer that the mortgage ratio increased in the first 6 months after the launch of the mainnet, and the rapid release of major investors led to a rapid increase in circulation. After reaching the peak of the mortgage ratio in June, it began to decline, and the rate of change in the mortgage ratio was 6/ 12/36/72 ushered in obvious changes, corresponding to early investors and laboratory/foundation lock-up and unlock points, and the final ratio approached (M+V)/0.7.
There is also a pledge for Filecoin mining. Storage miners need to mortgage FIL tokens for sectors that have completed the space-time proof to obtain the right to produce blocks. The purpose of mining pledge is that the official hopes that miners will not do anything that will damage the security of the entire network during the mining process. According to the estimation of the total pledge amount of the network, it is approximately equal to 35% of the FIL circulation of the entire network.
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Filecoin Mining Status: Mining Freezing Point
The current release of Filecoin tokens mainly comes from two aspects. One is that the space race in September received system subsidies, which subsidized a lot of test tokens, which have actually been transferred to the main network tokens. The second is the unlocking of investors, protocol lab officials and foundations.
But in fact, the reasons for miners' "insufficient balance" are: 1. Most of the miners did not participate in the space race; 2. The block reward is released linearly at 180 antennas, but the linear release has recently been adjusted, and the original 100% of the block The rewards are released in 180 days, changed to release 25% first, and the remaining 75% are released linearly according to 180 days. The 25% linear release can relieve the pressure of some miners, and they can take 25% of the release reward to mortgage to increase computing power; 3. The Filecoin network also has a system penalty mechanism, such as sector failure and termination fees. Various reasons have led to the current mining status of Filecoin miners, which is what we call the mining freezing point. That is, miners cannot mine without coins now, and if the number of coins is not enough, the computing power cannot be used. And there is also a penalty mechanism for mining, which will also cause tokens to be confiscated by the system.
As a result, financial products based on Filecoin also appear in the market to solve the problems faced by miners. Including Filecoin spot, leverage, contract instruments and Filecoin lending. On September 22, Colin, the head of the Filecoin project, mentioned the concept of FIL+DeFi=DeFil at the SpaceRace1 celebration. That is, through decentralized mortgage loans, FIL users lend FIL to stakeholders such as miners through the loan platform on Ethereum. There will also be DeFi-based financial transactions in the future market, including the DeFil scenario of Filecoin tokens in the data storage and retrieval trading market.
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Discussion on the future mechanism of Filecoin: Algorithm migration may occur
Filecoin is currently facing three major challenges: 1. Short-term network goals and conflicting interests of participants; 2. Disadvantages in storage costs and efficiency; 3. Algorithms and models restrict many miners from participating in ecological construction.
Judging from the official attitude, the current mining algorithm of Filecoin will face adjustments. The SDR algorithm is an algorithm currently used for packaging. This algorithm can be said to be the most time-consuming and computationally intensive. Moreover, the calculation of the SDR algorithm is not a parallel calculation method, but a serial algorithm calculated in sequence. This algorithm also has a disadvantage. Because of the time-consuming calculation in the early stage, the retrieval of the network in the later stage will be particularly slow. When you retrieve data from the network, its IO performance is extremely low.
If the algorithm is not changed, it may affect two aspects. One is that the current game situation will continue, and it is still difficult for many small and medium miners to participate. Second, retrieval is also key. For users of the real Filecoin storage network, the retrieval experience will be particularly poor.
In fact, officials are currently considering upgrading to the NSE algorithm. The NSE algorithm adds parallel computing on the basis of the SDR algorithm. The data in the SDR algorithm can be split into many units for parallel calculation, and finally a result can be gathered. Thereby greatly reducing the time miners spend in sector encapsulation.
After parallel computing, its entire mining hardware no longer needs such high-end AMD chips with limited mass production capacity, and Intel chips can also be well supported, from the perspective of packaging time. Parallel computing will also promote the development and production of ASIC chips. It is believed that after the algorithm migration, ASIC mining machines similar to large integrated circuit chips will appear on the market and Filecoin mining machines will appear. The lowering of the mining threshold will definitely attract more miners to join.
However, the design of this piece still takes into account the security of the network. Officials need to consider whether there will be a concentration of large mines, mining pools, and computing power similar to Bitcoin; whether it will cause damage to the security of the storage network; whether it can pass Design other mining model parameters, such as increasing the mortgage amount of large miners to make a more balanced design, etc.
Finally, from four aspects, Filecoin needs a more balanced design of the decentralized storage incentive mechanism, namely:
How to motivate users to use Filecoin storage, currently there is no relevant incentive design
How to motivate miners to actively look for real user storage orders
Balanced storage and retrieval performance
About Huobi University
About Huobi University
The Global Blockchain Leader Program (GBLP for short) is the top business course in the blockchain industry launched by Huobi University. A model of transformation in the blockchain era.
The GBLP lecturer team spans the three worlds of global academics, business, and venture capital, and has developed a global blockchain leadership course based on the demonstrations of blockchain technology experts and business leaders. GBLP courses will be taught in Chinese and English in Beijing, Hainan, Silicon Valley and other places, and will be divided into modules such as trends, industries, investment, and study tours in Silicon Valley. Courses include blockchain industry trends, global blockchain policies and laws, blockchain + industry scenarios and case studies, blockchain project investment trends and logic, blockchain and new economy and new finance, etc.
Since its establishment, Huobi University has been committed to cultivating top talents in the industry. Yu Jianing, President of Huobi University, has repeatedly stated that in order to seize the opportunities in the blockchain era, the most important thing is to realize the cognitive upgrade and effectively grasp the "blockchain thinking", which is a set of Internet thinking and financial thinking. The complex thinking system of , industrial thinking and community thinking, and Huobi University’s series of courses are based on this logical system, hoping to help great innovators in the blockchain field "pull through the fog ahead and go through Looking at the present in the future", using the power of "blockchain +" to effectively help all walks of life to achieve industrial upgrading.
