Filecoin has been postponed again and again. Which one is more worth participating in, mining or futures?

On August 11, Filecoin team core developer Why said on Slack that because miners are currently facing a lot of problems that have not been solved, there is no plan to start large miner testing for the time being. Whether to start the space race (originally planned to start this week) depends on the Calibration test network and the overall situation of miners.

Filecoin testnet incentives and mainnet launch delays have become a routine. If it were in the past, it would have triggered heated discussions in the community, but now everyone has become accustomed to it, and there are only a few people responding on Slack. A member of the Filecoin community once "joked" that "Filecoin mainnet launch delay is no longer news." The words reveal the helplessness of being angry at the lack of resistance.

Previously, it was learned from official public information that the launch time of the space race will be August 12 at the latest, which mainly depends on whether more than 50% of the miners participating in the calibration period network can achieve a transaction success rate of more than 75%. It is not difficult to infer from the remarks made by Filecoin core developer Why on Slack today that the dashboard data represented by the transaction success rate must be unsatisfactory, and there are also large and small bugs that need to be solved. Instead of launching a devastated defective product, it is better to calm down and polish it patiently, so that Filecoin can meet the challenges of the future distributed storage field with a better attitude.

From the official standpoint of the Filecoin project, there is nothing wrong with doing so, and the purpose is very simple, which is to hope that more large miners will participate and ensure that the mainnet can run smoothly when it goes online. After all, among the participants in the entire Filecoin ecosystem, no one should want the mainnet to end up in a mess as soon as it goes online.

Some people say that 2020 is the year of the "Three Musketeers" of Polkadot, Ethereum, and Filecoin. The arrival of Polkadot has opened a new chapter for cross-chain technology, and various ecological projects are booming; Ethereum has supported the moat of Defi, and made everyone smell the breath of a bull market; now only Filecoin is ready to go, but because the Calibration network is still being adjusted and optimized, in the face of many uncertainties, many investors who missed the private placement in 2017 are hesitant, and have doubts about mining and futures, and don’t know what to choose?

Mining is a business. You need to invest a certain amount of hardware equipment initially, find an IDC room that can be operated and managed, and then participate in the Fil mining ecosystem after paying the electricity bill. Unlike Bitcoin's mining mode that repeatedly calculates a single SHA256 hash algorithm, Fil mining machines need to seal sectors and continuously submit time-space proofs to the network to prove that they store real and valid data. Under the expected consensus (EC) scheduling, the earlier the miners participate in mining, the higher the effective computing power stored, and the more Fil tokens allocated by the corresponding network, which is an opportunity.

Of course, the potential risks are not small. The economic model design of Filecoin requires miners to pledge a certain amount of Fil tokens in the early stage. It is very unlikely to reproduce the phenomenon of Bitcoin mining-selling-withdrawing. If the cash flow of miners is not sufficient, they will be unable to support themselves in the face of high operation and maintenance fees, custody fees, and electricity costs. In addition, after many official adjustments, the penalty mechanism has become more stringent. Miners who fail to store files within the promised period will be punished. This makes many miners at a loss, and some are even pushing for plans to fork Fil. Let's wait and see!

Futures are derived from spot, which refers to the transaction of buying and selling standardized forward contracts of commodities or financial assets in a fixed trading venue. It is equivalent to a certificate that can be exchanged for spot at a specific time in the future in the trading venue, here referring to Fil tokens.

Since the Filecoin mainnet has not yet been launched, the Fil currently circulating in the market are all futures. According to non-small data, there are dozens of Fil exchanges online in the market, and the Fil issued by each exchange is internal and not circulated among each other, resulting in a huge difference in Fil prices.

Data source: Gate.io

Given that the cryptocurrency industry lacks a mature regulatory system, there is no rigid control over whether exchanges can fulfill their promises to redeem Fil in the future. When the initiative is completely in the hands of exchanges, there is a huge redemption risk for investors. If you are interested in Fil futures, Kaysen still recommends trading on exchanges such as Gate.io and Lbank, which all participated in the private placement of Filecoin in 2017 and are more secure.