Opinion: To be honest, I am not optimistic about small investors buying Filecoin futures easily

Editor's note : In the fifth issue of Waiyi Investment Class: "Preparing for the Filecoin testnet, who will get the 4.25 million incentives?", we invited "Li Bai from the Coin Circle". Li Bai from the Coin Circle is a core developer of the Pomegranate Mining Pool and the technical leader of the Filecoin mining project. He has been engaged in blockchain technology research and development for many years and has a deep accumulation in the field of zero-knowledge proof. He is currently in charge of the Pomegranate Mining Pool Filecoin mining project, including hardware selection, software optimization, etc.

Regarding the recently popular Filecoin, even as a senior project researcher, "Li Bai of the Cryptocurrency Circle" also showed the rigor and seriousness unique to a science student during the live broadcast.

The following are the core points of his live broadcast, which are summarized as follows:

[What is the research value of Filecoin? ]

I am a technical person, and there are several things that are very attractive to me.

The first decentralized file storage network. People often confuse it with distributed storage, but in fact it is more decentralized storage. That is, on the basis of traditional distributed storage such as BT, Xunlei, and Baidu Cloud, an incentive mechanism is added to allow all miners to contribute their hard drives and participate in the mining of the entire network. Finally, a series of unexpected application scenarios are born. What kind of applications will be developed on this platform in the end? I believe many people are looking forward to it. I think it is a very innovative and valuable platform.

On the other hand, from a more technical perspective, I think it is an improvement on the existing blockchain technology, a deeper application. Filecoin makes extensive use of some very new and popular technologies, such as zero-knowledge proof and delayed verifiable function, which is also a very big innovation in the field of algorithms and technology.

Based on the above two points, I still have high expectations for the entire Filecoin platform, so we are also actively investing in it to design its mining and solutions.

【Why is Filecoin always delayed? 】

There are two main reasons for delay:

The first reason is that network problems and bugs occurred during the development process, which really affected the subsequent use and had to be repaired and deployed.

The second reason is that the official team has been thinking about it. The storage network involves a set of economic models that have never existed before. Mining used to be stateless, and you could mine and leave at any time. But for the storage network, leaving means taking the storage and hard disk offline, which is likely to cause data loss. So the official struggle is how much punishment to give to miners who leave?

If the penalty is too high, it will discourage miners from participating in the network. If the penalty is too low, it will be very cheap for everyone to leave. Let's wait and see how the authorities will decide on the penalty for leaving the network.

[How can ordinary investors benefit from Filecoin? 】

For small-scale investors, the market is currently launching cloud computing to meet the needs of this group of people. So is this a strategic model? Then it is sold to you based on the amount of storage. Generally speaking, for example, it fills the equipment in three months and then sells it at a certain price. At present, this is a way of small-scale investment.

In addition, some trading platforms have launched futures in August. But to be honest, I don’t recommend it because it is risky. I don’t know what the futures are anchored to, and whether the platform really has so many futures. For cloud computing power, it is also invisible and intangible.

However, if you have a full understanding of the seller, brand, and technology and trust them, you can still do it. This is a process of opinion. Because a mining machine is expensive, in order to cater to this situation, some trading methods such as futures have emerged in the market.

【Things to note for ordinary investors to invest in Filecoin】

In the early days, mining machines were very opaque. As the mainnet approaches, the hardware of mining machines is becoming more transparent. At this stage, if the hardware is not transparent enough, it can basically be ruled out. This is the first basis for judgment.

The second point is the test network ranking. If the ranking is too low, it will also be excluded. Because the technical problems that need to be solved on a small scale and a large scale are very different, they may involve, for example, the bandwidth of the main network, the task allocation between machines, and the construction and maintenance of a distributed storage such as large-scale storage, so the difficulty increases exponentially.

Finally, there is an indicator: how many T of computing power can be obtained every day for every 10,000 yuan. If the indicator provided by the other party has sufficient basis to support it and is confirmed to be relatively credible, it is still a good choice to use this indicator to measure.