Produced | Odaily
Editor | Hao Fangzhou
Produced | Odaily
The recent focus of the blockchain industry is none other than IPFS.
In order to help investors understand the development direction of the industry and find real investment opportunities, on July 22, Odaily held the "Interstellar Rise - IPFS Technology and Distributed Storage Ecological Cloud Summit".
The first roundtable discussion in the afternoon was themed on "Opportunities and Challenges of Participating in Filecoin: Ecological Prospects and Application Value". Odaily invited Hou Feng, Founder & Chairman of Mac Storage, Shang Silin, Partner of Mars Blockchain & President of Mars Cloud Mining, Li Peicai, Co-Founder of Shanghai Diyi, Kristen, CMO of ChainX, and Andy He, CMO of Hashpower. Distinguished guests expressed their opinions in the questioning of Jun Yao in the host chain node live broadcast room.
Hou Feng said that IPFS is a new underlying Internet protocol, and all existing applications will need to run on IPFS in the future. With the increase of security and retention of network storage, the prospect of IPFS is limitless, just like HTTP supports the current prosperous ecology of WEB2.0. It is conservatively estimated that Filecoin can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, if the Filecoin token economic model can run smoothly on IPFS, it will have great reference value for the entire ecological project.
Shang Silin believes that Filecoin currently has three main layers: the first layer is the basic ecological value of Filecoin mining and the secondary market, and it is expected that Filecoin (FIL) will enter the TOP 10 in the first year; the second layer is Filecoin business The ecological value of the application, the commercial application of Filecoin is the target cloud storage and distributed storage market; the third layer is the ecological value of the native application including the Filecoin wallet, client, developer tools, etc. Who can become the Google of the Filecoin application ecology is expected, but there is no such thing at present, including the developer community, which is still in its infancy.
Andy He believes that Fil currently has the right time, location, and harmony. "Since the halving of BTC, the market has been short of hot spots, and Filecoin has gradually entered everyone's field of vision as the expected launch time of the main network is approaching. more and more expectations."
Li Peicai said that after the Filecoin ecological mainnet is launched, the possible impact on distributed storage is still relatively limited. "Now the entire Filecoin currency is basically separated from the IPFS network. Now the large IPFS mining machines cannot be directly connected to the IPFS network, which is basically still unavailable. The main thing is to store some locally generated Data. It will be more reliable to evaluate this matter after Protocol Labs has further developed the entire Filecoin project.”
For the choice of cloud computing power and mining machine manufacturers, Kristen recommends that users go to a platform with credit endorsement, investigate the technical background of the team, make more comparisons, and write down the number of the mining machine and other information when signing the contract at the end to prevent being deceived .
The following is the content of the roundtable discussion, organized by Odaily:
Junyao: Before officially starting the questioning session, I would like all guests to introduce themselves to the audience friends, and briefly introduce themselves and the business that the team is focusing on.
Hou Feng:Hello everyone, I am Hou Feng, the founder of Mac Storage. As early as 2017, Mack Storage was deployed on IPFS and Filecoin, and it is very optimistic about this track. From the perspective of the overall layout, we have invested at least 500 million yuan in this track. At the moment when the reward coin mining officially started on August 3, I hope that all friends will pay more attention to our Maike Storage, and let us work together to build this ecology well.
Kristen：Hello everyone, I am Kristen from ChainX. ChainX is taking advantage of cross-chain to enter the Filecoin ecology. The cross-chain work has been progressing for a while; at the same time, we are still doing some Filecoin mining pool development. At present, Filecoin is mainly focused on these two directions.
Andy He：Good afternoon everyone, I am Andy, the CMO of Hashpower. Let’s briefly introduce Hashpower Interconnection. Hashpower Interconnection focuses on the mining industry and provides one-stop digital currency mining services and cloud computing power solutions. More than 50 million U.S. dollars, and have good cooperative relations with Canaan and Avalon. Before Hashpower Internet was mainly engaged in BTC mining services, this year we also heard some big miners’ demand for Fil mining, and after a few months of understanding and research, we feel that Fil’s top mining is still a risky return It is a pretty good project, so we are also working with our partners to lay out the Fil mining ecology. Currently, Hashpower is the exclusive agent of Hengtong Cloud Filecoin mining machines, and we also hope to link some traditional BTC mining resources for the Fil ecology.
Shang Silin:Hello everyone, I am Shang Silin, partner of Mars Blockchain and president of Mars Cloud Mining. Mars Cloud Mine is a one-stop computing power service platform, which was launched in February this year. We sell both physical bitcoin mining machines and cloud computing power. We are also the earliest follow-up of Filecoin cloud computing power. We did a 7-hour Filecoin live broadcast on May 15, and have maintained good cooperative relations with mining machine manufacturers such as 1475. At present, more than a thousand Filecoin miners have purchased computing power on our platform and are preparing to mine in the Filecoin field.
Li Peicai:Hello everyone, I am Li Peicai, the co-founder of Shanghai Diyi. The main business of Kuyi is to do POW mining, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and so on. At the end of 2014, we paid attention to the IPFS ecology and were very optimistic about the whole project. However, the launch date of the mainnet was repeatedly postponed. Recently, after two rounds of each testnet, it feels that the mainnet launch date is getting closer and closer, so we started to spend time in March and April this year to study the similarities and differences between this track and the original POW mining.
secondary title
Q1
Jun Yao: Let me start with the first question. Filecoin or IPFS is a hot spot that everyone is looking forward to this year. Not only has it attracted many new players, but also many industry veterans have devoted their energy to researching Filecoin. In your opinion, what is the greatest value brought by the Filecoin ecosystem at present? How is the market size surrounding the Filecoin ecosystem calculated? What is the current market size, how much can it reach in the future, and what factors will it be affected by?
Hou Feng:Let me first express my personal opinion on what brings the greatest value to the IPFS and Filecoin ecology. First of all, IPFS is a new underlying Internet protocol. Some apps we see now will be redeployed on the IPFS network in the future.
What can Filecoin bring? Whether Filecoin is a blockchain token or a token. If Filecoin's token model can run through the entire network of IPFS, its significance will be historic and revolutionary. Just like in the Internet age, the first email was successfully sent.
Moreover, it will also bring us a lot of reference data and value. We can design and solve some pain points and problems in other industries based on Filecoin's economic model. At that time, Filecoin truly represents the blockchain token, and finally has a place to use, which is a very big meaning.
How to calculate the market size surrounding the Filecoin ecosystem?With the improvement of the security and retention of network storage, especially the layout of Internet giants such as Microsoft, Google, JD.com, Alibaba, and Huawei Cloud, the consensus on distributed storage is strengthening. Therefore, in the long run, the prospects of IPFS are limitless, just like HTTP supports the current prosperous ecology of Web2.0.
I have seen some investment reports pointing out that the global data market will reach US$60 trillion by 2025, of which the storage market will account for more than 60%, or more than US$36 trillion. Before, I conservatively estimated that Filecoin was worth three hundred, five hundred, or one thousand dollars. If its promotion and application are very good, and it can really reach thousands of households, then its market value will far exceed our imagination. It can reach more than 10,000 US dollars.
What factors will Filecoin be affected by in the future? I think it is its legal compliance, that is, the compliance of the storage content itself. The official has also formulated a series of technical means, such as some node certification, node consent, one hundred node certification can delete some data; also set "upload is responsible"; in addition, the uploader can be determined by address search Subject, to avoid uploading illegal content.
Shang Silin:I think the value of Filecoin is mainly divided into three levels.
The first layer is the ecology of tokens.How big is the ecology of the token and its direct investment? Two benchmarks have been made in the secondary market. One is the market value of Filecoin. I think it is worth looking forward to entering the TOP10 in the first year. I think the current value of 2.5 billion US dollars is reasonable. In the first year, it should release about 400 million tokens, and the price should be around $5 to $10 or around $10, which is predictable.
In terms of mining investment, we have also done some simple research. It is estimated that the entire investment of Filecoin mining machines in the first year, including second-hand servers, is expected to be around 100,000 units, which is more than 10 billion yuan. What is the concept? The investment in new Bitcoin mining machines in 2020 is about 2 billion US dollars (14-15 billion yuan). The volume of Filecoin is very large. I think it is a very important ecology and asset in the past three years.
The second layer is the value of the entire business application of Filecoin.Filecoin is so far one of the few distributed storage networks that point to commercial-scale applications. It is different from Ethereum and Bitcoin, and its ambitions are even greater. Commercial applications are benchmarked against cloud storage and distributed storage. market. As you all know, with the rapid development of the Internet, including our own 5G and the development of the Internet of Things, the growth rate of data storage is also very fast. The annual growth rate can reach 18-20%, and by 2025 it will exceed 200 billion US dollars. scale.
How much of the market Filecoin can divide depends on its competitiveness, such as speed, security, privacy, etc. The overall competitiveness of Filecoin remains to be seen. However, I think it is essentially a decentralized storage for some cold data or privacy-related aspects. If there is no such infrastructure, in the future 5G, the Internet of Things and massive data related to individuals will be generated, and the centralized data possession and application method will be a relatively large potential risk for everyone.
The third layer is the value of native applications.The towering trees that can really grow in Filecoin are not based on the traditional commercial market, but on decentralized storage. This is where its real value lies, but we haven't seen it yet. Just like in the Internet era, Google grew up on the Internet, not replacing anyone in the original traditional world, but another level of competition. Who is Google in the Filecoin ecosystem? I think it is very worth looking forward to, but at present this area has basically not developed, including the developer community, which is still in a relatively weak and infancy stage.
The value of the three levels is different. What we can see at present is its token value and mining value.
Kristen：The decentralized storage brought by IPFS technology, as well as the decentralized market of Filecoin, will replace the oligarchy of the Internet. These are very realistic. Looking at the main body of commercial applications in the long run, the short-term market value is 1.5-2 billion US dollars is not a big problem. It is benchmarked against projects with the same financing scale and operating cycle in the past; the overall market value of Filecoin in the future will be more than 10 billion US dollars, provided that distributed storage technology realization. In addition, in the future, Filecoin will be affected by some technologies in the early stage of development, and technical bottlenecks need to be overcome; in the later stage, it will be affected by policies, such as the supervision of digital currency, the supervision of the Internet by the Cyberspace Administration of China, etc. Long-term policy factors also need to be considered .
Andy He：I thinkFil currently has the right time, location, and people.
Time: The greatest value of Filecoin is to combine blockchain technology to build a stable, low-consumption and high-efficiency storage network and become the infrastructure of the 5G big data era.
Geographical advantage: Since 2017, hundreds of mining machine manufacturers have been building and promoting the Filecoin ecosystem, and some ecosystems have initially formed.
Renhe: Since the halving of BTC, the market has been short of hot spots, and Filecoin has gradually entered everyone's field of vision as the expected launch time of the main network approaches. Based on the expectation of the growth of the data storage market and the star halo of Filecoin itself, Filecoin began to Carry more and more expectations.
Now the ecology of Filecoin is mainly mining machines, and it is conservatively estimated that there will be a sales scale of tens of billions, although there are some marketing companies in the middle. According to the forecast of authoritative foreign media, the global cloud storage market size will be 285 billion US dollars in 2024, or about 2 trillion yuan. Assuming that the market share of distributed storage with IPFS as the underlying protocol is 5%, that is an ecological environment of 100 billion yuan. scale.
Li Peicai:In terms of the current completion of the entire network, in fact Filecoin is not yet a real effective storage. Even after the mainnet is launched, everyone may generate useless data and store it in it. The long-term value lies in the improvement of the main network, and how to effectively store data and design models. This is a relatively long-term process.
In the short term, the market's expectations and concerns about Filecoin have a greater impact on the market value. The other is the design of the mortgage model, and its economic model has not been finalized. Especially when it was first launched, the entire circulation may be relatively small. With the full network unlocking and mining, nearly 700,000 coins may be thrown into the market every day.
Based on the above data, I think there are two levels of understanding:
The first layer is how many people buy coins directly every day, which will have a relatively large impact on the price. Now there is no real application on Filecoin, and no one will buy coins to store data. At present, the biggest buyer is likely to be miners, because a mortgage mechanism is designed in mining. Now the pre-mortgage has not been determined, which is the biggest variable in the first three months. If there are a lot of pre-mortgages, miners will have a strong demand to buy coins, and the price of coins will rise sharply in the early stage
The second layer, according to the current popularity of mining, if there is no pre-mortgage, I think the market value is about 2 billion to 2.5 billion US dollars, and it is not a big problem to enter the top ten.
Hou Feng:During the Hangzhou Blockchain Week, we had an exchange with companies such as 1475 and Space Time Cloud on the number of pre-mortgages. If the official pre-mortgage amount is very large, we will definitely ask them and negotiate, so the final mortgage amount will definitely not be very large.
Shang Silin:Some time ago, I saw a point of view: the amount of FIL released every day is of the order of 700,000 to 800,000. According to the current price of futures in the secondary market, theoretically speaking, it is more than 80 million funds to carry; Bitcoin is based on the current market value. In fact, the total value released by Filecoin every day is not as high as that of Filecoin, so I feel that the price of FIL cannot be supported.
secondary title
Q2：
Jun Yao: Filecoin is a distributed storage application, so how much it can store is very important. At present, a distributed storage project such as Sia with a total market value of 140 million US dollars has only 673 TB of storage in its network, which is even less than 0.002% of the total global data production in 2018. It seems that the market prospect of distributed storage is very small, and it is very difficult to be used by the current large enterprises. Will the launch of Filecoin change this situation? If you can't win the demand side and grab the storage market share, does distributed storage still make sense?
Kristen：From the current point of view, it is difficult to change this centralized solution in the short term. There are technical problems that need to be overcome, but distributed storage is still very meaningful.
First of all, distributed storage can make the entire storage market bigger.In fact, distributed storage is not a project starting from the demand side. The demand side can actually grow gradually with commercial applications.For example, in the era of paper media, there was no rigid demand for electronic media. With the development of the Internet, the demand for electronic media has only developed. Therefore, technological reforms, efficiency improvements, and policy changes in distributed storage will gradually cultivate demand.
In addition, distributed storage has been applied a long time ago, such as the very familiar BT download, the download speed is indeed very fast, and it was also used a lot at that time. It fully utilizes the technology of distributed storage, but it gradually faded out of people's vision because of the problem of the model. Distributed storage is in the blockchain industry, and the future is still worth looking forward to.
Shang Silin:If it is commercial, it still depends on its competitiveness.
Today's distributed storage such as Amazon and Alibaba Cloud has actually developed very well and matured in terms of security, stability, speed, and usage costs. Filecoin is a decentralized distributed storage, and it started to face the competition. Whether it is really able to surpass these traditional distributed storage in terms of these key indicators and is competitive, I am still not sure.
In addition, it should be emphasized that decentralization does have unique advantages in terms of privacy protection and data verification, which are not available in other distributed storage.Now with the development of 5G and the Internet of Things, data information has penetrated into all aspects of work and life, and massive amounts of data are generated in real time. In such a scenario, I think the characteristics of Filecoin are very good in protecting people's privacy and security. Later, I also want to ask Hou Feng of Mac Storage, whether Filecoin has real competitiveness in these core indicators?
Of course, this is also a process of development. Filecoin may not have such strong competitiveness at the beginning, but I think its real value lies in a certain incremental market, but it is still hard to judge where the market is. Is it the protection of personal cold data, such as medical data, smart devices and personal relationships? Will anyone develop applications for C-side data storage in the future, whether Filecoin's privacy and low cost can tear a hole in the cloud disk, these are all possible.
The short-term progress will not be too fast, and it is indeed possible to face problems such as brushing data at the beginning of the launch. But for what is completely valid data, where is the source of valid data, and how to verify it, I think this is a very complicated system. If this aspect is completely perfected, it may not be realistic to develop Filecoin's miner system.First, there is a cold start. Even if you use bill swiping to prove that the entire storage network can operate normally and efficiently, I think it is necessary to verify yourself like Bitcoin.
Hou Feng:First, distributed storage is indeed a very basic construction. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu have been doing distributed storage for many years. Distributed storage is not what we are doing now. What we really do is actually called "distributed storage". Weak centralization" or "multi-centralization", even the "decentralized" distributed storage that I have never wanted to talk about, it just increases security and reduces the pain points of traditional distributed storage. cost.
Second, about commercial storage. Just now Pei Cai always mentioned that it may take one to two years to really achieve commercial storage. In fact, the official definition now is called effective storage. To put it simply, the mining on August 3 is not that the more data you store, the higher the ranking, the more coins you get; it is that the official distributes valid data to you, and the data comes from the orders they have obtained. Only by uploading or storing valid data on the official website will there be corresponding rewards, which is called effective storage.
The old-fashioned storage projects we mentioned before disappeared after a short period of time, and they were suspected of manipulating the market. The main reason is that the proportion of applications is small, and no one really uses them. In contrast, Filecoin's applicability, consensus, and implementation are all leading, and there is no comparison between the two.
As for the demand side, there is no need to worry at all, because Protocol Labs has found many partners to provide storage space, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Ali, and Huawei, all of which are its data providers, using IPFS technology and experiments room for cooperation. So don't worry about no storage requirements for the time being, we should now discuss more about how to store commercially.
Filecoin is still very likely to solve the problems we discussed above-commercial storage and effective storage within one to two years.
Li Peicai:secondary title
Q3：
Jun Yao: At present, many miners have begun to pre-sell their own cloud computing power in advance, but the water of cloud computing power is quite deep. Please talk to the bosses about how to identify reliable cloud computing power.
Hou Feng:I am not very experienced in choosing cloud computing power, but I am quite experienced in mining machine companies. Because cloud computing power is similar, it is generally no problem to buy cloud computing power and choose big companies and well-known companies in the industry. After all, they will not cooperate with bad mining machine companies.
Concentrator company, I have six suggestions for reference:
The first is to look at the strength of the company, its experience and achievements in the industry. In the week of August 3, you can pay attention to Mac Storage. Mack is stored in the entire track. From the construction of the computer room to the production workshop of the factory, the total investment is nearly 500 million yuan. They are all in Jiangxi. You can visit them on the spot, which cannot be faked.
The second is to look at the parameters, to see some of our configuration requirements for the machine. If the parameters are configured too high, it will directly affect the encapsulation.
The third is to look at the efficiency. For every 10,000 yuan we invest, he can package the corresponding packaging speed. We invested 10,000 yuan, whether we bought computing power or a machine, how much data can be packaged for me per hour.
The fourth is to look at the company's operation and maintenance capabilities. Our current operation and maintenance team consists of 53 people, and 5,000 devices can be installed, debugged, and deployed to achieve final optimization within ten days.
In the end, it depends on the price. Whether it is cloud computing power or a mining machine company, we recommend not to buy ones that are too low in price, as they may not be able to mine many coins; The essence of the cloud computing power of 10,000 yuan is the same as that of coins dug out with 3,000 yuan of cloud computing power. We don't consider the too high or too low.
Another is to look at fate. Whether you look at our founders or those who sell cloud computing power, look at the company as a whole, and be a human being before doing things. It's useless without fate.
Kristen：The first is to recommend users to platforms with credit endorsements. Behind the cloud computing power platform is how to choose the mining machine and how to choose the mine management. These two points directly reflect whether it is reliable. We have no way to directly supervise the operation of the mine. When choosing a cloud computing service platform, try to choose those platforms that are reliable. The resources of the platform reflect the influence of the industry. In addition, the technical requirements for the application of IPFS software are very high. You can start with the technical background of the team. If a team has not been working on IPFS for a long time, the reliability is not very great. Finally, when signing the contract, is it possible to write the number of the mining machine or the like, do more comparisons, and analyze management fees, cycle products, and comprehensive data.
Shang Silin:We are a cloud computing platform in itself, and I think what Kristen said is very correct. Because what we do in this industry is very subversive and innovative, and everything related to investment and transactions requires a strong credit endorsement. What the team has done depends on the team's past reputation, which is very important.
The second suggestion is that there are still certain uncertainties in the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. We must maintain a certain degree of openness, and we must maintain the computing power of many leading manufacturers. After several rounds of research and screening, including on-site research, the computing power of 1475, Space-Time Cloud and other companies was finally launched. Our principle is that we do not make mining machines ourselves, but cooperate with the best partners. They have been in this market for two to three years, and have deep technical accumulation and project coordination. While keeping an open mind, we also advise our investors not to put all their eggs in one basket. Small-scale investment can be made before the mainnet goes live, and you can choose to increase your investment later. This is a more appropriate investment strategy.
Li Peicai:Let me explain the Filecoin mining mechanism to you first, so that everyone can help you understand mining.
After our research, in fact, there is still a big difference between Filecoin mining and Bitcoin mining. For Bitcoin mining, when you buy a machine, it will reach full capacity at once, so the higher the computing power, the higher the income. However, Filecoin mining is different. It is actually divided into two parts, computing power and storage capacity. The computing part is for processing data. You must first process it into an effective storage through the computing unit; the storage part is the hard disk that everyone knows. Filled, it is only valid after filling a valid hard disk. This will cause two problems, your computing part is idle and there is no more space to store these new data after recalculation.
Therefore, if you buy Filecoin mining machines or cloud computing power, it is best to be able to calculate these two costs separately. One is how much to spend to buy this computing power; the other is to buy 1T storage capacity first, and I can use my income to add this storage. If the income is poor, I will not add it later. In this case, I think it is more reasonable, and it is also the solution we are more inclined to choose at present.
Andy He：At present, the price of a Fil mining machine with the minimum configuration is more than 100,000. Cloud computing power lowers the threshold of participation, which has its certain value, but cloud computing power is also somewhat opaque, and there are some ways in it.
The price of cloud computing power varies greatly, and they are all priced in T of physical storage. I think the price is not the most critical factor, but depends on the efficiency of currency production. There are several issues involved in this. Most of the cloud computing power is not sold for effective storage. After the mainnet is launched, there is still a p disk packaging process. The packaging speed of the manufacturer is also a very important indicator.
A single effective computing power cannot reflect the final amount of coins invested. If you want to clearly judge the mining machine's block production strength, you must know the number of Fil dug out by a single T effective computing power.
secondary title
Q4：
Jun Yao: At present, there are various Filecoin mining machine manufacturers, and almost all of them are providing one-stop services from mining machine production and sales, hosting and operation to mining pools. From miners monopolizing all businesses to role segmentation, what conditions do you think are needed and how long will it take? Or do we need to wait for the industry to develop and why?
Hou Feng:This is the case in the short term, and should change after August 3rd.
At present, the machines stored by Mack are not in the same place, but in three places. This is mainly for network security, and I am worried about encountering some attacks. We have waited for three years in this industry to put all the machines in the same computer room. If hackers attack our equipment through our IP address, our computing power will be quickly reduced, and our success will be lost. Therefore, we are divided into three places to solve this problem. We have the ability to connect to the mining pool in different places. Whether your base is in Beijing or Shanghai, as long as you want to connect to our mining pool, it is technically possible. of,
As for how far it has developed, it is very simple. On August 3rd, the miners' reward coins will be tested, and the strength of each company will no longer be hidden. I believe that the company's strength, operation and maintenance capabilities, and ability to return to customers will be clear at a glance after this day. I believe that in the next three to six months, the market will enter a stable period.
Shang Silin:The reason why it is "all in one" is because of its framework. The mining pool must be in a physical mine. Unlike Bitcoin, I can switch mining pools at will after I buy it. This is determined by the characteristics of Filecoin mining, and it may last for a while.
Now some mining pools are also researching openness and taking over machines from other mines, but this efficiency is currently relatively low, and this situation will last at least three to six months. On the one hand, it relies on the technology of mining pools, and on the other hand, professional service providers with stronger market competition, resource operation and market organization capabilities come out.
Andy He：At present, mining machine manufacturers are the most powerful in the FIL ecosystem, and most of the ecology is still built by mining machine manufacturers. However, we have also seen that some mining machine manufacturers are cooperating with wallets and other ecosystems, and most of the IDC computer rooms are still rented by manufacturers, so after the mainnet goes online, it is not that mining machine manufacturers completely monopolize the ecology.
In addition, the Fil mining machine is a better collateral than the Bitcoin mining machine. After the official mining on the mainnet, Fil will definitely have financial services to participate in the mining ecology of FIL, which is why Fil manufacturers may not be able to do so currently. of.
At the same time, the various components of the mainstream BTC mining ecology are also very powerful at present. Except for the software optimization part of mining, the threshold of other ecology is not high. In the later stage, the fil ecology will definitely be improved by integrating excellent companies in the industry.
Kristen：We think that the division of labor can be gradually clarified, but only after the mainnet goes live.
Li Peicai:(over)
(over)
