Can Filecoin Achieve A Market Value of 100 billion Any Time Soon?

Filecoin 3 years late，Can it achieve a market value of 100 billion
Filecoinbe will be able to successfully launch the mainnet this year? which is  three years late.What is the support behind the high-profile storage market?LLab invited Li Bai from the  shiliu pool to have an in-depth discussion with you.

LLab: First of all, thank you very much for participating in our current AMA live broadcast

The Filecoin mainnet will be launched this year and has attracted a lot of attention. The Filecoin public test will be held next week. In this issue, we have invited Li Bai, who is well-known in the industry, to introduce himself.

Li Bai:Hello, everyone, I am Li Bai from the pomegranate mining pool. I personally have a technical background. I have been in the blockchain development industry for many years. I have been doing some low-level and application development work before. I also have a lot of research on zero-knowledge proof. This year, I was mainly responsible for the development and research related to Filecoin mining at shiliu pool.

LLab：Filecoin officials believe that real data is very important. In order to prevent mining from evil, many rules have been formulated and verification nodes have been added. Can you tell us how this verification node works? How to prevent mine work from evil?

Li Bai:Huan, the founder of Filecoin, put forward the idea of verifying users verified clients and client verifier in a video AMA at the end of May, with the goal of reducing malicious behaviors in the network by relying on the power of the community. For example, miners make false data transactions, earn illegal rewards, and reduce things that are detrimental to network development.

The idea is this: select some validators through the Filecoin community and on-chain governance. These validators are geographically dispersed and well-reputed individuals or institutions. These verifiers will verify the identity of customers who have submitted large amounts of data transactions to prove that these deals are real and not the product of malicious nodes.

Huan also said when introducing the verification scheme that it may take a long time to achieve. From the perspective of usage, this kind of governance means at least has to wait for the mainnet to go online and there is a certain amount of stored transactions before it becomes meaningful.

LLab：Officials have said that NSE will not be adopted on the main net before and the algorithm will be updated after the main net. I would like to ask whether the updated algorithm will affect the existing mining machines? Why does the official adopt NSE after the mainnet goes live?

Li Bai:The current SDR in the PreCommit1 stage mainly relies on the CPU with SHA extension to perform calculations. If it is changed to NSE, GPU computing may be more efficient at this stage, and the existing mining machine architecture may have some waste in performance. However, NSE is an algorithm that the official has only recently begun to study. Although the calculation efficiency will be improved compared with the existing algorithm, this change requires a lot of development and testing work. This is why it was not launched on the mainnet because it was too late to develop.

We know that the development and testing of the Filecoin system is very difficult, and the official will be more cautious when making major changes to the underlying algorithm, so the current mining machine is very safe in the early stage of the mainnet. As for when the algorithm will be changed and what algorithm will be changed, it is difficult to predict. The official may also develop an algorithm that is more efficient than NSE, but it is certainly not in the near future.

LLab：I have learned that other projects are also doing hard disk mining (POC), such as Burst and BHD. Is there any difference between Filecoin and them? At the same time, there are many storage projects SC, LAMB, etc. on the market. What is the  difference and competitiveness of Filecoin from them?

Li Bai: Filecoin can also be regarded as hard disk mining, but it is different from many hard disk mining projects: Filecoin's purpose is storage, and capacity proof is only a means of obtaining incentives; while most hard disk mining projects use hard disks to replace computing chips. Mining, not storing. So we can see that Filecoin has higher requirements for miners' hardware and network, because it must ensure that storage and retrieval functions can operate normally.

Filecoin is the best technical project in the decentralized storage industry, with the most accumulated technology. The team has developed IPFS, libp2p and other widely used protocols and technologies, and has a lot of experience. At the same time, Filecoin's ecological construction is also very good, which may also benefit from the development of projects such as IPFS, which has accumulated some reputation for the team.

LLab：We all know that the testnet in July was postponed, and the mainnet launch was also postponed to August 31~September 21. We would like to know what is the current status of Filecoin? Will the second public beta be launched on August 3?

Li Bai:At present, from the code level, Filecoin has basically prepared the award-winning testnet and mainnet, and there is no problem with going online on schedule. Now,the biggest problem  in parameter settings and economic models. For example, the recent Calibration network has modified waitseed and pre-mortgage, which is not very friendly to miners and should be adjusted later.

LLab：Have you talked about waitseed, can you briefly introduce what waitseed is? Why is it unfriendly to miners? Can it be optimized?

Li Bai:I just spoke about this issue in a video in our community yesterday. Waitseed is a waiting stage between PreCommit and Commit. This stage is to wait for a certain block interval, then obtain the latest block as a random number, and then perform the commit operation. The official recently changed this waiting parameter from 10 to 150, which means that it was originally waiting for 10 block heights, but now it has to wait for 150, which is a little more than an hour.

The lengthening of this waiting time is to increase the uncertainty of the random number, thereby improving security.

What is the impact of this change? The most direct thing is that the idle time between precommit and commit becomes very long, and the utilization of the machine will decrease. For our machines, due to the large amount of SSD space, this problem can be optimized through some process and scheduling adjustments, so it has little effect on the overall efficiency.

LLab：Recently, I heard that the testnet has changed a lot of content. Can you briefly talk about what changes the official has made? What challenges does it bring to the current mines?

Li Bai:The most recent adjustments have been changes in some parameters and economic models, such as waitseed and pre-mortgage.

The longer waitseed time will have an impact on the mining efficiency of some mining machines, and pre-mortgage means that early mining requires a large amount of FIL to be mortgaged to participate in mining, and the mined rewards have a lock-up period, so it will affect the early circulation. Huge, I explained these parts from the code and calculation level yesterday. At present, these changes are experimental in nature, very immature, and are likely to be optimized.

LLab：Some time ago, I heard that the test network has made some adjustments. Can you briefly introduce what changes have been made?

Li Bai:Space Race is scheduled to go live next week, not necessarily which day, the official has given a one-week time frame. In the recent AMA, everyone asked a lot of questions. For example, the official bot is set up in Europe. Do Chinese miners need VPN? How does the official determine the location of the miner?

The official answer is that the network problem needs to be solved by the miners themselves. Everyone’s situation is different, so no unified plan will be given; as for the geographical location of the participants, since a large part of the rewards are distributed by districts, the official will register Participants perform verification, which is likely to be a combination of technical and non-technical means. Participating in the reward test network requires KYC, and it is likely that you will need to provide more information about the location of the tubing. The specific plan is not disclosed, but cheating is likely to lose all rewards.

LLab：We have learned that FIL mining filling time seems to be an important indicator, but there is basically no mining pool on the market that can clearly give its own filling time. Why? What is the impact of the filling time on FIL mining revenue?

Li Bai:Our mining machine sales page clearly gives the filling time, everyone is welcome to check it out. In fact, it is not only the filling time, but also information such as hardware configuration and test results are very important for investors to judge the level of the mining pool.
The faster the early filling, the greater the advantage of the miners in the early mining, but the official has weakened the advantage of the “head mine”, and now the pre-mortgage is added, the advantage of the early filling speed will be discounted. In addition to the filling speed, hard disk capacity and storage scalability also have a great impact on the overall revenue. If there are not enough hard disks left, the computing hardware is equivalent to idle after filling, which will result in a waste of capital utilization. The cost of storage devices such as hard disks is also very high, and the importance is not less than that of computing hardware. The cost of supplementary storage is also a point that everyone needs to pay attention to when looking at a plan.

LLab：The main network is not online, but there are already a lot of data rankings of testnets to see. I would like to ask whether the data ranking of this testnet really makes sense? What channels or methods can be used to identify the true strength of a mining pool?

Li Bai:I think the test network data ranking should refer to the total computing power ranking. This data has its meaning. For example, being able to be on the list at least shows that you have the ability to run the node and can encapsulate it. If you are in the first few places, it also shows that the ranking is Enough machines are participating in a period of time. But also pay attention to a few issues. The first is that this list is dynamic, and it will be cleared every time the network is reset, so some miners are no longer participating in the list; second, more computing power does not mean high efficiency. The machine can also achieve this effect.I think it is necessary to combine multiple dimensions, such as the rate of block generation, the growth rate of computing power, and the overall degree of information transparency, to comprehensively judge the strength of the miners.

LLab：In addition to miners, mining requires users to have demand for the system to operate. What we are seeing are all miners working, but the demand for users is not very clear. Do you think that after the Filecoin mainnet goes live, What are the real storage requirements? Is it possible that the real demand for DeFi is too low at present? If this is the case, will the government also adopt incentives to encourage users to use storage?

Li Bai:The real demand is hard to say, because it takes time for a network to start from 0, and it is impossible to cause a sensational network effect in three months. Those who really have storage needs will also be more cautious. After checking for a period of time to see if your network is stable and whether there is an advantage in storage and retrieval costs, then you can decide whether to store important data with you. So I am cautiously optimistic about the application scenarios. In the early days, I will definitely focus on technical improvement and ecological construction. You know that Ethereum went online in 15 years, and it took 17 years to usher in the first outbreak. In the long run, this matter is valuable, but it will take some time to manifest.

As for incentives, it is possible. We can see that the official attaches great importance to real data, so there are such things as Discover hard drives. As for user incentives, we have not yet seen any official actions in this regard.

LLab：The Filecoin mainnet has not been launched, but many exchanges have launched FIL futures, and the prices are also uneven. What do you think of this phenomenon? In addition, I saw that some people in the market have already estimated a single FIL price of one thousand dollars. Do you think this price is reasonable? What is the reasonable price valuation structure?

Li Bai:I think everyone should have their own research on the corresponding product attributes and delivery capabilities when buying FIL futures, because as far as I know, the differences between these products are quite big. As for valuation, I don't think there is an absolutely reasonable valuation method, because there is no completely rational and effective market, especially for the cryptocurrency market, so the price fluctuation of cryptocurrency can be so large. A valuation method corresponds to a logic, but whether it can be reflected in the price depends on many other factors, and it also depends on the overall market view of Filecoin and FIL. The strength of our technology is to look at the development potential of the technology and application of the project, not to judge the price.

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