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What are the pits behind the Swarm that store the fire on the track?

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BZZ's early private placement price was only $0.25, and some estimates, based on Filecoin's performance, suggest that the price of BZZ could be around $100. Swarm is an opportunity, or a trap?

原文标题：《买矿机、买额度、买 CoinList 账号，为 Swarm 值得吗？》

Original article by: Deep Chain Six Six, Deep Chain Finance

Original Editor: Doorman, Deep Chain Finance

Less than a month into the Chia mining boom, another mining project is on fire.

Swarm, the so-called Ethereum Foundation's distributed storage project driven by Ethereum founder Vitalik, has been attracting a lot of attention for a while now.

"The era of big data is coming, now is the era of a lot of hot data", "FIL how many times? Chia how many times?" "Private placement of 0.3DAI, opening up to 1600U". Swarm's followers can be found preaching all over the WeChat community, and even some former Filcoin miners are said to have converted their FilecoInc IDC rooms into Swarm IDC rooms.

However, it's hard to ignore that Swarm is hot, but not without its share of chaos and problems.

With the mainnet not yet online and no official recommendation, there are already a lot of Swarm miners on the market. Despite Swarm's concerns, just like Filecoin and Chia's early days, its popularity continues to grow. In addition to the hype surrounding the miner, some people are looking for ways to access Coinlist's KYC account in order to compete for public funding for the upcoming BZZ (Swarm token). Others bought as much as $50 worth of BZZ from the sidelines. In addition, on some exchanges, futures prices on BZZ are high, currently bidding as high as $255...... Swarm, what exactly is it? Why is it so popular? Hot behind, and what are the traps?

What is Swarm?

In fact, the concept of Swarm was first proposed in early 2015 by Ethereum's three founders Vitalik, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke. At that time, in addition to creating eThefang, they also tried to create a peer-to-peer storage and service solution with no downtime, zero failure and anti-censorship, and on this basis to create a system of economic incentives to promote the exchange of resource value. This was the genesis of Swarm, as it's known, a distributed storage class project.

Swarm was originally conceived as part of the Ethereum ecosystem, after all, it was proposed and developed by the Ethereum Foundation. In addition, the Ethereum Foundation allows Swarm Mine Pool storage, bandwidth, and computing resources to support the overall growth of the Etherium-based network. As a result, Swarm was initially viewed as one of the three pillars of the Web 3.0 component, along with Ethereum and Whisper. This, of course, gives the current Swarm of mining traffickers the perfect pitch: the Ethereum Foundation, V's own development, and Boca's founder Gavin Wood's support for another King of Mining project. However, Swarm has since spun off from the Ethereum Foundation to form its own dedicated Swarm Society in Switzerland.

Although Swarm has been lumped together with projects like Filecoin and Chia, there are big differences between them.Swarm is not a public chain, but a smart contract that exists within the Ethereum ecosystem. While invoking Swarm's contract often means high Gas bills, it also facilitates access to other applications of the Ethereum ecosystem. A review of Swarm's timeline shows that since the project was created in 2015, there has been no sound. The test network was only announced on February 14th this year. The main network has not been launched yet, it is expected to be this month, but it has not been fixed yet.

For investors, the biggest concern is probably the project's token.

Swarm's token, called BZZ, has an initial public circulation of 62.5 million. 50% of the quota will be allocated to the early fundraiser, 20% will be held by the team, and the remaining 30% will be allocated proportionally to the foundation, etc. At present, Swarm has received Alphemy Capital, BitScale Capital, DFG, KR1, Hashkey, NGC Venture, Goup Capital, P2P Capital, WaterDrip Capital, and White Investments from Paper Capital and YBB Foundation Ltd., among others. According to the information disclosed by KR1, the price of the BZZ private placement is about 0.25U, and the tokens allocated by the private placement round are about 23.91 million, accounting for about 38.3% of the initial issuance.

What is mining like?

Although often mentioned together, Swarm differs from Filecoin and Chia in its mining form.

The Filecoin network has two roles, storage miner and retrieval miner, so both providing data storage and data query miners benefit. In addition, Filecoin requires a mortgage to mine. In CHIA, the user plots the hard disk and then sends it to the CHIA mainnet for verification. If the verification is successful, the user will be rewarded with blocks. For more details, please refer to Deep Chain Finance's previous article "Explore Chia Mining: Is' Green Bitcoin 'Fry Hard Drive?" While CPU and packaging speed are the most important parameters in Filecoin mining, hard disk size and p-disk efficiency are more important in Chia mining.

In Swarm mining, network bandwidth and hard disk storage are the most important metrics.

In Swarm, there are two roles: Data Submitter A (the test network phase is temporarily replaced by 35 Queen Bee nodes with which users can only interact to obtain valid credentials) and Data Storer B.User A transmits data to User B, which is then stored by User B. When user B has completed the data storage, user B will send A storage feedback to user A.User A will judge user B's network bandwidth and storage performance based on this feedback. After that, user A sends A credential: QBEE to user B. User B, who is charged with the storage task, can exchange BZZ through this credential. In this process, User B is constantly responding to data transmitted by applications from all directions. And after User B is responsible for storage, it will send the storage feedback back to each application and obtain the corresponding income certificate.

This process is Swarm's mining behavior.

Swarm mining, though, seems to have a lower bar and a simpler approach than Filecoin and Chia mining. But it also has many problems need to pay attention to. The mainnet isn't online yet and there's no official recommendation, but Swarm has a lot of mining services on the market. Amid all the hype, is Swarm mining really so beautiful?

Where is the pit?

Filecoin, Chia, and today's Swarm have a lot in common. They were all developed by overseas teams, and they all have impressive backgrounds.

Filecoin has been called the "King of Storage Project"; Chia is held by Bitorrent Starter New Project and Coinbase Investments. And V god, Gavin Wood and others have been the biggest aura of Swarm. But if you only rely on these "halo" to invest, you may step on a lot of pit. After all, both Filecoin and Chia's mining machine sales were scams. From the $2 billion Filecoin scam to the $2 billion Starcraft Snail scam, to the sloppy p-plate handling of the Chia miner, the vast majority of users are suffering unneeded losses. With all the ads peddling Swarm mining machines already out there, isn't there a scam?

The answer seems self-evident. Besides, does Swarm mining need a miner at all? It's still a problem...

Technically, users who want to mine will be able to set up their own mining nodes at home, without the need for Swarm mining machines. In addition to individual miners, there are also organizations currently peddling Swarm Mining. Generally speaking, there are two mining methods launched by mining institutions. One is cloud node: cloud server rented in the cloud is used to set up Swarm configuration. For example, servers of Ali Cloud and Tencent Cloud can directly rent and deploy Swarm cloud node to conduct mining test network. The other is the physical node: the current physical node refers to the Swarm mining machine built by purchasing "whole machine server", which consists of a series of computer related accessories including CPU, memory, hard disk and so on. The better the network bandwidth, the more QBEE miners can dig, but it does not mean more BZZ rewards.

As mentioned above, 35 randomly varying Queen Bee nodes prevent malicious ticket brushing, but also increase the uncertainty of user return acquisition.Just like buying a lottery, choosing a cloud node only increases the probability of a user "winning", but it does not guarantee that the user will "win".

There may be more pits in physical nodes than in cloud nodes. Because Swarm mining relies only on network bandwidth and storage configurations, the so-called physical miner is more like a server. At present, the physical mining machine on the market often sells at about 20,000 yuan. And in the current electronic market, the price of a brand new server is only a few thousand dollars, and even the second-hand server price on idle fish is only a few hundred dollars. In addition, Swarm's main network is not yet online, and the criteria for Swarm mining have not yet been clearly defined. Plus, unlike traditional mining, Swarm's etherium-based ecology may require it to pledge a certain amount of ETH for the cost of contract calls and expensive Gas during subsequent mining. What's more, Swarm miner sellers told Deep Chain Finance that once the Swarm mainnet goes live, users will still need to pledge to participate in mining, and while the pledge doesn't lock up the warehouse, if users don't pledge, mining efficiency will decrease, just like with Chia and Filecoin.

So Swarm mining may not be all it's cracked up to be.

In fact, in addition to the pit of the mine, the amount of BZZ to buy is also risky.So far, BZZ's initial private offering price was only 0.25 dollars, but now it's around 50 dollars on the sidelines. Before and after comparison, the early private equity participants have already made 200 times.

Layout long? Or high plate? This may require some serious thinking.

If you want to join Swarm, it might be a good idea to attend the Coinlist public offering on June 15th. After all, Swarm's public offering price is only $1.92, which is a bargain compared to the current "sky-high" off-site price. However, that's only if Coinlist's complicated KYC is handled. Therefore, in recent days, the information of purchasing Coinlist accounts in Moments and Weibo emerged in an endless stream. And even if you do get an account, there's a risk: Will the account be officially blocked by Coinlist? Spending money to buy an account number to be able to grab certainly?

Why are you so keen on Swarm?

Although Swarm main network is not online yet, there are still a lot of people to buy: buy mining machine, buy quota, buy Coinlist account... What is the reason?

For one thing, Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, two well-known names, are enough to attract a strong following in the industry.

Second, and more important, is the potential wealth effect behind Swarm.At the time of the launch of the Chia mainnet on March 19 of this year, the over-the-counter price of the XCH was around $25. But when Huobi launched XCH on May 14, its price soared to as high as $2,149, a nearly 86-fold difference. Similarly, in July last year, the market forecast for FIL futures rose above $20, but in April this year, FIL futures reached an all-time high of $237, a gap of nearly 12 times. It's worth noting that early public and private offerings of Filecoin cost as little as $0.75. At that price, the maximum FIL return would be around 316 times.

With Filecoin and Chia's "Beads on the Front," the market expects the same from Swarm. BZZ's early private placement price was only $0.25, and some estimates, based on Filecoin's performance, suggest that the price of BZZ could be around $100. What's more, Swarm's founding team is more polished than Filecoin and Chia, and the price of BZZ will only be higher, not lower. In addition, recently, the world has been emphasizing low carbon and environmental protection. Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, which once flourished at that time, have been hit by electricity problems, and traditional miners are facing the dilemma of withdrawal. And the relative energy saving and environmental protection of CHIA, SWARM at this time become one of the choices of some miners transition.

In addition, miners who have experienced the benefits of Filecoin and Chia have many options to switch to Swarm, and participants who have previously missed out on Filecoin and Chia mining are eager to take advantage of the opportunity. Miners like 1475, which previously featured Filecoin mining, have launched their own Swarm mining hosting service. In addition, compared with Filecoin, the price of mining machine is often tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and the complex P plate process in Chia mining. Swarm mining is more approachable, both in terms of cost and difficulty, and has attracted a lot of users from both circles and beyond.

However, as mentioned above, Swarm Mining has its advantages as well as its problems. If users want to participate, the first thing they need to do is to sharpen their eyes and be thoughtful.