Agent: How do I sell millions of Filecoin?

Original title: "2020, Capital Betting on Filecoin Mining"

The original author: NBSP; & have spent Xuejiao Huang, Odaily Planet

Recently, Filecoin has two high-profile things, one is the official sale of hard drives, and the other is the test network exposed "token unlimited issue vulnerability".

, no matter good or bad in send a strong signal to the people: compared with the "slow" progress of the previous two years, today's Filecoin entered the iec fast perfecting stage: from the test code, to launch more version of the client, and then to market Coinbase etc a wallet to support its scrip FIL, and multiple currency project and fund announced that enter the Filecoin dig.

In short, Filecoin is a hit, not only for its own reasons, but also because of the lack of buzz (essentially, the lack of money) this year.

In the primary market, people have not seen the quality of new projects raised for too long, and occasionally some of the projects on the /IEO, not the past ten times the myth. In the secondary market, the "halving effect" of Bitcoin was repeatedly hyped, and many people took full leverage to "meet the bull market", only to be cleaned out by the great crash first. As for the mining circle, many miners are already on the verge of losing money under the heavy pressure of multiple rounds of tumbling prices, half of the block reward, and rising water computing power.

People are constantly looking for new wealth-making machines. Ethereum 2.0 is one, Filecoin, once the "top current of the coin ring", is another.

Compared with the "first movers" who flocked to the Filecoin mine in 2018, this year's entrants are late but smarter.

Two years ago, the Filecoin mining market was rife with fakes and capital. Investors who got in at the wrong time were bound to become cannon fodder.

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In 2020, capital circle will compete for Filecoin 

Filecoin mining is undoubtedly a recent hot spot in the capital circle.

In April 2020, Filecoin mining solution provider "1475" announced the acquisition of HashKey Capital, distributed Capital and Imogen Capital injection, with the post-investment valuation of RMB 400 million.

By the end of May, The Daily Planet Odaily learned that Keystore, an enterprise encryption asset service provider that had previously won the establishment dollar Fund and invested tens of millions of dollars in distributed capital, had also quietly entered the market and positioned itself as a Filecoin mining solution provider.

According to a coin circle fund partner Bryce (pseudonym) revealed that the fund intends to invest tens of millions of funds to test the water Filecoin mining, is currently investigating the head of the miners.

Shao Jianliang, general manager of Jiannan blockchain, said publicly in an event at the end of May that PoW has entered a relatively high threshold stage, and distributed storage has opened up a new battlefield besides computing power. Jiannan is paying attention to the development of IPFS and Filecoin mining.

5 & have spent On May 29, the head display card mining machine manufacturer Panda mining machine co-founder Yang Xiao said the company this year will focus on the layout & NBSP;; Filecoin  Mining track...

Since 2017, Filecoin, a shining new star, has attracted numerous fraudsters because the project token and mine are in the "air stage" for a long time, which makes the traditional coin circle and mine circle stop looking forward to Filecoin mining.

Today, Filecoin has not yet landed, but people's perception of Filecoin mining and their willingness to participate have changed quietly.

It all started six years ago.

In 2014, Stanford graduate Juan Benet led a group of undergraduates in creating IPFS, a protocol designed to replace HTTP.

HTTP is the most widely used network transmission protocol on the Internet, and IPFS can be understood as the distributed version of HTTP. Its workflow is "to fragment and encrypt files -- upload them to distributed nodes to complete data storage -- then retrieve, synthesize and decrypt them from distributed nodes to complete data reading".

Similar to blockchain, "distributed, censorship resistant, and more open" are the biggest selling points of IPFS.

To drive the adoption of this open source protocol, Juan's team (also known as Protocal Labs, Protocol Labs) released a new distributed storage protocol, Filecoin, in June 2017, which aims to increase the implementation/adoption of distributed storage by adding financial incentives.

The big idea, the go-go, go-go ICO project raised $57 million from nine well-known investors, including Sequoia Capital, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Winklevoss Capital.

In a subsequent public offering, Filecoin raised $205m in a month, making it the largest in history at the time, even though it only raised money from Coinlist, a compliant financing platform, for qualified investors (annual revenues of $200,000 or more), shutting out countless retail investors.

Filecoin didn't come online until the team, the capital core, the hot fundraising and the abundant capital.

Those who could not participate in 1CO thought of panning through FIL futures and mining machines.

Gate. IO, LBank and other exchanges have put futures FIL, in the bull market the price shot up 1.5 times.

In the hardware market, "air project" Filecoin physical mining machine is also launched.

The total number of Filecoin is 2 billion, 70% of which is NBSP; To the miners, 15%& NBSP; To the development team, 10%& NBSP; To investors and the remaining 5% to the Filecoin Foundation. A total of 20% of the team's and fund's tokens are unlocked linearly over 6 years, and 10% of the investor has unlocking periods ranging from 6 months to 3 years. Therefore, the early circulating tokens will be obtained mainly through mining.

Filecoin's mining algorithm is a unique PoC mechanism that competes for billing rights and storage costs by investing in storage capacity. PoC consists of two parts:

Copy proof (PoRep) to verify that the miner has stored the documents as required;

Spatio-temporal proof (PoSt), in which copy proof is continuously generated to prove that the miner has been storing the file.

Miners who complete the two steps will be able to fight for a piece.

For Filecoin mining machine, the test is its ability to store and transfer data, such as the amount of storage, retrieval speed, transmission bandwidth, delay and so on. Filecoin typically contains a CPU, GPU, motherboard and hard disk, similar to a well-equipped computer plus a hard disk, unlike bitcoin's ASIC, which requires custom chips. However, the cost and efficiency of different hardware are different, so how to configure highly available mining machine is still a mystery.

Miner manufacturers thus produced.

Computer assemblers in Huaqiangbei were the first to sense an opportunity.

Elsewhere, there is no such thing as a diamond without a diamond. But for the Huaqiangbei people who have been riding every wave of hardware, from the shanzhai machines of the early days of the mobile Internet to the mining machines of the 2017 bull market, there is nothing they can't do.

Filecoin project is popular, and the market has a demand for Filecoin mining machine. After tasting the profiteering of flip mining machine, huaqiangbei businessmen hope Filecoin can make another brilliant achievement.

What makes it even better is that when they distribute the Bitcoin mining machine, they can only make one middleman's money, and when they produce and sell the Filecoin mining machine, they can make two links of money.

Thus was born the upstream supply chain and some manufacturers, who did not even care whether they produced mining machines or scrap iron or whether they could find the money.

Since 2018, hundreds of Filecoin miners have sprung up, with more than a dozen now making their name and many more secretly sold in "private domain traffic."

The following figure shows the manufacturers and miners in the "Study Notes of Blockchain" in 2018.

Screenshot from: Chaoge block chain study notes

Without a doubt, most of these are fake Filecoin miners.

Li Bai, chief architect of 6Block pomegranate Mine, makes a judgment from two aspects.

Logically speaking, Filecoin didn't officially start submitting the code on Github until June 2018, and didn't finalise the mining plan until June of this year. "So how can the mine machine that was randomly installed two years ago work?"

Moreover, according to the hardware configuration required by the current main network, an ordinary Filecoin mining machine needs at least AMD CPU, 1TB SSD (solid state disk) and 128GB of memory. The cost of these accessories alone is not less than 6000 yuan. On the contrary, the price between 2000-6000 yuan, how to achieve the basic configuration?

Employees at Starland, which is still in operation, said that none of the machines can mine alone, but only participate in the cluster as a storage node. In addition, "the product didn't sell very well and was taken off the shelves very early."

At that time, there was also a market with a price between 5,000 and 10,000 NBSP; Yuan of mining machine, but a Filecoin mining machine manufacturer, pointed out that its availability is also a question mark.

The person in charge said that most of these mining machines are household network storage devices (namely NAS machines), which adopt ARM architecture and have low configuration and are not enough to support algorithm operation. The stability is not guaranteed when setting up the cluster, so it is not suitable for digging Filecoin.

If you buy one of these mining machines, you may not be able to help but think, less performance is worse, less digging.

However, according to "Li Bai of coinage circle", low ore distribution opportunities lead to low mining efficiency and too slow calculation. However, the government sets a minimum speed threshold for mining, and the three mining stages must be completed in one day, otherwise the system cannot become effective calculation force and compete for blocks.

But it was these fake and outrageous mining machines that were all the rage and made a lot of money.

Take the only "snail Mining machine" investigated and prosecuted by the police as an example. According to a report by China Business News, from October 2018 to February 2019, the company sold nearly 300,000 "Snail Interstellar servers" to thousands of people in the name of Filecoin mining machine, and cheated 2 billion yuan in only five months.

The snail miner is just the tip of the iceberg. As Filecoin goes online, more fake miners will show their true form.

Some people may ask, mining does not seem to be a routine, understandable investment project, how the fake miner circled so much money?

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How do I sell millions of fake miners? & have spent

The problem is Filecoin's "new." The disc jockeying takes advantage of people's lack of knowledge about their field of expertise by trumpeting the lucrative rewards of star projects and luring investors from the coinage or other niche markets.

Abbiang is the agent of one of the mining machines (also known as "city node"). He has been making a living as an "investment project" for a long time. In 2017, he made some money in the 1CO wave in the bull market of currency circle, but unfortunately, he failed to catch up with the Filecoin project.

So when Mr Abbiang found out that he could buy, sell and run Filecoin, he decided it was his chance to get on the bus.

After studying the fundamentals of various mining machinery manufacturers, A Biang decided to invest hundreds of thousands of yuan to buy 40 mining machinery from a certain manufacturer, obtain the qualification of a first-class dealer and get the lowest purchase price.

For Abbiang, the attraction of this manufacturer lies in having physical companies and products to examine, and its marketing and operation model is very mature.

On the one hand, the factory chamber of commerce took agents to the company to visit, provide training courses; On the other hand, we will put advertorials and video games online to build the brand. Offline, we will help agents to sell by holding regular sales meetings.

Filecoin  Mine machine classic copy

The more extreme brand is to pay for celebrity platforms. For example, the above-mentioned snail mining machine actually invited Rupert Hoogewerf, the founder of the "Hurun List", on a conference sale, and said he would cooperate to create the CAI 100 Rich list to indirectly endorse the project.

CAI can be understood as a Filecoin imitation chain made by the snail miner team. The purchase of the snail miner can be "one machine, two digging" CAI and FIL.

The picture shows Hurun participating in the SNAIL Mining machine (CAI) activity

One machine double dig is also a classic marketing strategy, the logic is smooth (dig a small currency before going online, to maximize the revenue), but the token created to sell the miner, you can imagine the K line trend. Even though the token is not issued by the mining machine manufacturer, but the PoC project token like Filecoin, from the fundamentals to the token price, there is no better project.

But buyers of mining machines take the "formula" at face value.

According to Abbiang's observation, most of the customers coming through the online and offline channels are elderly people, many of whom have joined and invested in Internet projects before, or played with COINS, or simply played with coils.

"Although people don't know much about files and data storage, Filecoin has the natural advantage that the project team and the management are reliable, and its information is all over the Internet," Says Abbiang. "Unlike real projects, it's much easier to promote than a new small project."

Mr Abbiang found that, like himself, they had no good projects to invest in.

"We all believe in the myth of doubling sudden wealth, so the investment opportunities in the big market, such as stock fund management and so on, must be looked down upon. Seeing Filecoin and participating in it, I feel my good luck is coming."

When asked if he had alerted these newcomers to the risks of delays in the project's main network and failure to deliver the miners, Ah Biang waved.

"You don't know, sell this, try not to suggest risk. Profit is the word, and you have to advertise high yield."

Mr Abbiang himself, too, is attracted by the benefits of "urban nodes".

After becoming the "node", the mining machine with the purchase price of thousands of pieces can be sold to about 10,000 yuan, with a high profit, which is a one-time gain of hardware. The second income is mining into. Because of the professional mining itself, ordinary customers can hardly operate and maintain their own mining machine, so the manufacturers provide more one-stop service from production to mining, as for the charge, mainly by collecting customers to dig out a certain proportion of tokens.

After operating for 3 months, according to A Biang introduced, mining machine prices even abruptly rose by two or three thousand. This has nothing to do with cost, of course, but is a "marketing ploy".

"It's not good if the price goes down, it means that your asset is depreciating. The more it goes up, the better, so our price will go up in echelon form. The goods are the same."

Raising prices can also create the "illusion" that the cost of entry is lower than that of entry later. According to 24/7 Technology, one of the company's marketing strategies was to issue a price adjustment notice, saying that the price of each machine would increase by 3,000 yuan, leading many investors to hoard the machines in advance of the price rise.

According to Abbiang, 2018 is Filecoin's best selling year.

"There are a lot of similar sales, to a lot of people, and often run a few manufacturers to do investigation, and currency is falling currency circle feel completely two things.

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"This business is no longer viable";

If a business is held together mainly by poor perception and opacity, it is likely to be unsustainable as information flows.

Peer competition will inevitably expose each other, plus the outside world's attention, the public doubt Filecoin mining machine more and more.

At the same time, this has been in the coin ring, disk ring across the project for a year, traffic seems to have peaked. "Fewer and fewer people are writing. It's not like we used to be able to convert a few clients every time."

In February 2019, the expected launch of the main network was delayed for a second time (Filecoin's original plan was to launch the main network in June 2018, like EOS), which also dealt a blow to many agents and investors.

That's when Mr Abbiang began to wonder if "something was wrong with the project".

"I was skeptical at first that these mining machines were like money printing machines, and the high returns of all kinds seemed unrealistic. But now that I chose [to sell] it, I convinced myself that it was real. At worst, the gap was unacceptable."

But now, thinking that there is no guarantee that the next launch date will not be "dove" (the main network is not online, their own hosting earnings will not be realized), as well as the risk of snail mining machine warning and "industry dividend peak", Abbiang's faith began to shake.

After months of backpedaling, He officially retired.

"If the customer doesn't pay the bill, the profit is thin, and they don't have a bottom for this thing. Maybe something will happen, and they can't stay."

Subsequently, a few agents at the same level and half of the sub-agents also left. Once active dozens of peers, also gradually no news.

Even the above mentioned "top 10 mining machine brands" that have little fame on Filecoin, most of them have disappeared.

Odaily daily planet one by one to check its website and found that most of the site has been unable to open, can open the web site, only the star mainland continues to sell Filecoin mill, another "Maya mill" on the official website has turned to sell "the etheric mill", but by the number of public and WeChat ID, officials were unable to contact.

Screenshot from: Maya mining machine official website

While the money has been pouring in, Filecoin is making encouraging progress.

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New entrants into the market, "good currency" can expel "bad currency"? & have spent

On December 11, 2019, Filecoin opened its testing network, giving miners a real testing ground. Although the token found in the test network is worthless, mining machine manufacturers such as 1475 still participate in the test to find bugs and improve Filecoin network.

By the time the second phase of testing started on May 15, Filecoin's replication proved that the mining speed had been increased by two times, and the codes had been verified for feasibility. Officials expect the main network to be online between the end of July and mid-August this year, barring accidents.

From a two-year delay to Filecoin just around the corner, not only did the buzz start to grow, but wallets like Trustwalle announced their support for FIL with action.

"Li Bai" vividly remembers that at the end of the team developing the ASIC mineral explorer (HNS), technical teams hitting the market with zK-SNARK proof of zero knowledge emerged. After understanding, the original people are Filecoin mining machine manufacturers.

In the Filecoin project, the realized effect of Zk-Snarks is that the verifier can judge whether the miner has honestly copied and saved the user's file with only the proof result of zk-snarks, without looking at the specific file stored by the miner, thus saving consumption and protecting user privacy.

Therefore, effectively running zk-snarks in the process of proof (mining) is the basic requirement of Filecoin mining software and hardware.

However, due to the profound cryptography technology, few people usually dabble in it, so many teams are almost "learning on the spot".

"Li Bai of Coincircle" and his team had previously developed a Layer 2 privacy protocol and understood the Zk-Snarks, so they decisively entered Filecoin mining mechanism after finishing the R&D of HNS miner.

Of course, being one's own expert is only a small part of the reason. Li Bai's team sees a greater chance that Filecoin carries the hope of subverting the tradition. After three years of painstaking research and development, Filecoin finally enters the eve of the formation and outbreak of ecological chain. Despite the risks, it's worth the gamble.

The Keystore also decided to test the waters. The company, whose core business is secure storage of private keys, has been studying how to better provide information protection, data privacy and secure storage.

"I decided to come in, not only because Filecoin was directly coupled to our business plan, but also because I saw a huge market demand." Jia Xudong, director of marketing at Keystore, told the Odaily Planet.

Since January, the Keystore team has contacted a number of institutional users who want to tap Filecoin, which can be roughly divided into two categories:

One is Filecoin's public/private investors, who are still bullish on Filecoin, and Filecoin mines are filled with FIL at a lower cost, so Filecoin can be interpreted as continuing to fill positions.

The other is a handful of big Bitcoin miners.

Pay attention to the attribute "minority". Most bitcoin miners reject Filecoin for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is that bitcoin miners rarely dig in other currencies, and Filecoin mining, once known for its cash registers, has many miners scorned. There are also those who do not reject the new currency, but are skeptical of Filecoin distributed storage business, believing that it may be subject to regulatory suppression like TON. Then there are conservative miners, deterred by Filecoin's early days by the lack of a reliable investment return model.

But there will always be miners with a taste for risk, who will put a small portion of their assets into "investing trends".

In fact, any smart miner would have realized that, in a world of block production and long periods of sideways currency prices but constant bets by participants, bitcoin mining has a ceiling and can lose money if you're not careful, just like Filecoin mining.

In an interview with The Daily Planet, Odaily saw a mine with an investment of more than $100 million, which is ready to put 10% of the money into the Filecoin mine. This scale of capital for the current Filecoin mining market is not small, and is currently the head of the mining machine manufacturers to negotiate cooperation.

The influx of new miners and miners at the institutional level will undoubtedly bring positive promotion of "good money driving out bad money" to the previously chaotic Filecoin mining market.

Take pomegranate mine pool as an example. It started mining at the start of the second test. With less than 10 mining machines, it entered the ninth place in the Filecoin power list. Among them, the daily accumulative computing power of a single miner can reach 300GB, which has certain advantages in efficiency improvement compared with some miners whose computing power is only 200GB.

On May 21, pomegranate Mine pool suddenly made its hardware proposal public, causing concern in the community.

As mentioned above, Filecoin producers have been selling all kinds of mining machines since 2018, and since they are futures, Filecoin mining machines are like black boxes for investors.

Pomegranate mine pool announced the original intention of hardware program is to provide reference for ordinary investors, some less professional manufacturers. Just as open-source software can spur the creation of more pools and decentralise computing power, the disclosure of Filecoin miners' two-year-old hardware proposal will do more good than harm to the industry.

The production and development of machines is a way to make money for mining machine manufacturers. The solutions have been opened to the public, and the competition has become the availability and maturity of software, operation and maintenance services, etc., thus stimulating the in-depth development of the industry.

Unfortunately, the rush to get in failed to catch up with Ah Biang and his clients.

At the time of his exit, Mr Abbiang calculated his participation in the year's harvest. "Not counting the revenue sharing from the future trusteeship, I made a sum of money by selling the hardware, but the dozens of mining machines have not yet started to produce money and have not changed hands, so I have been busy for a year and only made a" catch "."

With Filecoin's main web site coming online, he had no idea that his mine would be filled with FIL material. "At the worst, I'll sell the hardware at a 60 percent discount," He thought.

But it remains to be seen whether the miners will be able to deliver. Whether the money collected two years ago is used to buy mining machines, whether there is an operating loss and oversold are all risk points.

It is conceivable that Filecoin will lead to a series of "snail mine machine" scams, when investors embark on the "train of sudden wealth" heading for the cliff.

Abbiang, who is both a distributor and a victim, is impressed. But he has no hope of defending his rights.

"It is written on the sales contract that the machine will not be returned until it is sold. If the manufacturer buys a small amount of money through the secondary market and sends it to you, it will be said that the machine dug it. There is nothing you can do."

More platforms, such as the Aforementioned Maya mine, have been shut down and the project parties have long been out of contact. Moreover, two years after the fraud occurred, did the user intentionally retain evidence? Really want to protect one's rights, these situations are not optimistic.

Finally, Abbiang advises investors who are looking for an opportunity to enter the market to never be All In and live within their means for such high-risk projects. Moreover, they are still early investors who will join the project after it is launched. They should not worry about not being able to catch up with the car, and they should not have "faith" easily.

"Investing is investing, looking at returns and controlling risks."

Text link:https://mp.weixin.qq.com

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