Filecoin's final sprint "centralization" doubts have not disappeared

On August 25th, the Filecoin Space Race was launched. About 300 miners around the world participated in the competition. The purpose was to conduct stress tests and find problems, and compete for the official 4 million FIL rewards.

During this period, problems were exposed, and DDoS attacks and code vulnerabilities appeared one after another, causing some miners to lose computing power and even lose sealed data. The "mock test" before the mainnet launch of this round of Filecoin seemed a bit chaotic. Diancun Technology, which participated in the competition, believes that exposing the problem is a good thing. After repairing, it will make the network more and more secure.

In the final sprint stage, doubts about "centralization" came out in the Filecoin community. The mysterious miner "Song Jiang" previously posted that Filecoin is increasingly biased towards big miners, making the network centralized and insecure.

Some community members also believe that although Filecoin may form the current situation of concentrated Bitcoin mining computing power, it still has a greater advantage over centralized storage, and decentralization is a gradual process.

Filecoin, which is in the midst of controversy, will undoubtedly attract more scrutiny. At this time, DeFi rekindles the spirit of "decentralization" in the blockchain. Against this background, Filecoin, which claims to be a decentralized storage network, will be tested after it goes online.

Data: The 24-hour transaction volume of the DEX aggregator launched by DefiLlama exceeded $7 million: On January 5, according to data from 0x Explorer, the transaction volume of the DEX aggregator launched by the on-chain data analysis website DefiLlama reached $7.28 million in the past 24 hours. It is second only to Matcha's $13 million and surpasses MetaMask's $1.95 million.

It was previously reported that DefiLlama will launch a DEX aggregator on January 3, and you can get the best price from 8 different aggregators, including 1inch, Matcha, Paraswap, Cowswap, etc. [2023/1/5 9:53:47]

It has been 3 days since the start of the Filecoin Space Race (Space Race). This competition to motivate the testnet is regarded as the last "mock test" before the Filecoin mainnet goes live. the

According to data from Filfox, the Filecoin blockchain browser, since the race started at 6 am on August 25, the space race has attracted about 300 miners from all over the world to participate, and the effective computing power of the entire network exceeds 21PiB. the

The current block height of the Filecoin network is 1101238: According to IPFS100 reports, Filfox browser data shows that the current block height of the Filecoin network is 1101238, the effective computing power of the entire network is 10.603EiB, the total pledge amount is about 109.48 million FIL, and the number of active-ethexc miners There are 3,196 FILs, and the reward per block is 24.0214 FIL. In the past 24 hours, 338,979 FILs have been produced. The 24-hour average mining income is 0.0307 FIL/TiB. The current FIL circulation is 169,166,506. Currently, 27932358 FILs are destroyed. The current latest price of FIL is $88.08.

The current top three effective computing power are: f0688165 (MetaverseInfrastructure) ranked first with 134.42PiB, f0127595 (MetaverseInfrast) temporarily ranked second with 132.70PiB, and f0142720 (RRM-Athena) ranked third with 120.01PiB.

Note: According to the official release rules of Filecoin, Filecoin will usher in the second production reduction on October 15, 2021. [2021/9/11 23:17:36]

The space race attracts about 300 miners from all over the world

LendMi FIL single-currency locked-up volume exceeded 8 million US dollars: According to news on April 14, the LendMi FIL single-currency locked-up volume of the Filecoin-oriented lending platform exceeded 8 million US dollars.

It is understood that LendMi collects FIL in a decentralized manner to obtain higher currency-based returns for investors. LendMi ensures the stability of output by lending FIL to large nodes (large mining pools) for mining, and distributes the output rewards to investors according to fixed income. On the other hand, in order to ensure the validity of the pledged assets of the nodes, the community will elect large nodes (high value) and require the nodes to pledge the private key of the node to ensure the control of the node (the control can be verified by the miner signature). LendMi will support public chain ecology such as ETH and BSC in the future, and the platform governance will also adopt the form of DAO governance. [2021/4/14 20:19:58]

It's a showdown between the big miners.

According to the competition rules, participating miners must respond to storage and retrieval transaction requests from competition robots and maintain a success rate of 80% or above. Miners need to provide as much storage capacity as possible for the network during the three-week competition. In the end, according to the storage capacity ranking during the test period, the top 100 miners in the world and the top 50 miners in each continent will share 4 million FIL (Filecoin tokens) as a reward.

Lending platform Filda received 5,000,000 USD in HUSD, according to Jinse Finance, according to on-chain data, at 1:13:57 this morning, the lending platform Filda received 5,826,500 HUSD, and the suspected funds have been refunded. According to previous news, the lending platform Filda is suspected of being "lost $5 million". It is understood that a user is suspected of depositing 2000HT and lending 5 million HUSD. [2021/2/9 19:16:43]

Filecoin officially stated that the space race aims to stress test the network and help find problems, "We hope to make progress in the game." In this regard, the space race did not live up to the "expectation", accidents happened one after another in the past 3 days.

On the first day of the Space Race, many mining nodes encountered DDoS attacks, unable to mine normally for a short period of time, and saw a sharp drop in computing power.

A DDoS attack is also called a distributed denial of service attack. It refers to multiple attackers in different locations launching an attack on one or several targets at the same time. Usually, the attacker sends a large number of service request packets to the attack target. Services often consume a large amount of system resources, causing the target host to fail to work normally. the

As the first unofficial node to generate blocks in the competition, Diancun Technology encountered a DDoS attack. The relevant person in charge of the company revealed to Honeycomb Finance that the nodes began to be attacked intermittently about an hour after the first "qualification". When the node was created for 24 hours and the WindowPoSt needs to be submitted to the network, the attack reached its peak, resulting in the loss of a lot of computing power in a short period of time. the

The highest increase of ZB (ZB) FIL6Z is 19.98%: According to the data on the official website of ZB (ZB), as of 10:05 today, the highest increase of FIL6Z is 19.98%, and the current increase is 17.97%. The highest price is 179QC (about 26.4USDT), and the current quotation is 176.01 QC (about 25.9 USDT). The market fluctuates greatly, please pay attention to controlling risks. The full name of FIL6Z is Filecoin6Month ZB, which is a 6-month futures product of Filecoin launched by ZB. [2020/9/30]

For Filecoin miners, WindowPoSt is an important step in "proof of work", which needs to prove that the data of the sector is still stored correctly at regular intervals. "Maybe it's a big tree attracting the wind," Diancun Technology guessed the motive of the attacker.

In addition to DDoS attacks, the space race also exposed some code vulnerabilities for Filecoin.

"On the first day of the competition, the official released four or five versions within one day to continuously fix the problem," Diancun Technology pointed out. After upgrading the cluster code version from 5.1 to 5.4, it was found that it encountered a bug in the official code. During the process of sealing the data, some The sector data reported an error, and then there were two rounds of failures when verifying WindowPoSt, resulting in the loss of the data sealed on the 26th. the

Judging from the progress of the space race, there are still many problems to be solved in Filecoin. Although this is the side that officials hope to see, it also worries some followers. In this regard, Diancun Technology believes that the attack is not terrible. It can be seen as the attacker is helping to find loopholes. The more attacks, the fewer loopholes will be. After the main network is launched, the security will be higher.

According to Filecoin's recently updated mainnet roadmap, the Filecoin mainnet will be officially launched in mid-to-late September after the end of the space race. the

Filecoin main network roadmap

Since the beginning of research and development in 2017, Filecoin has finally entered the final sprint stage. On the official website, the designer wrote that Filecoin aims to become a distributed network that stores the most important information of human society. Decentralized storage is obviously the most attractive part of it.

However, on the eve of the mainnet launch, there were some different voices in the market. The mysterious Filecoin miner "Song Jiang" questioned that Filecoin is not decentralized enough. the

On August 19, a Medium user with the registered name "Song Jiang" posted that Filecoin is heading for a road of no return. Its rules are becoming less and less fair, and the entire network has become centralized. the

Taking the space race as an example, he said that the results of the space race are not determined by the decentralized network, but by robots; the so-called success rate is just a line of data, which can be fabricated and tampered with at any time, and cannot be verified by the public . the

In addition, he believes that the entire Filecoin mechanism is increasingly biased towards large miners. For example, in the space race, big miners can get extra rewards; before mining, a large amount of FIL needs to be purchased as front-end collateral, which makes it difficult for small miners to afford.

"When the network consists of only a small number of miners, the attack will become well-targeted and make the network unsafe," Song Jiang said after questioning that Filecoin is not decentralized enough. He will conduct DDoS on the top miners during the space race and other forms of attacks until their order success rate is less than the official threshold. the

After seeing Song Jiang's "uprising", Gu Qianfeng, an early developer of Ripple and a founding member of the IPFS Force Zone, also publicly stated that the so-called distributed storage protocol of IPFS is technically unable to achieve "random storage of files after fragmentation." For example, he said that if a person sprinkles 1 million money on the top of a building, it will be difficult for different people below to retrieve it if they pick it up. This is equivalent to random storage, but IPFS cannot do it. "Therefore, Filecoin based on the IPFS protocol cannot do it either. It is not decentralized enough and lacks security advantages."

Coincidentally, during the space race, the attack actually came up.

But Song Jiang denied that he was not responsible for these attacks. He analyzed that the reason why the miners were attacked was that the Filecoin miners participating in the competition had to disclose their addresses, which made the addresses easily searchable and increased the possibility of being attacked.

At the same time, he put forward some solutions, saying that community members can communicate addresses on the chain in an encrypted manner, and make the ordering and receiving of storage needs complete on the chain, and even use the randomness of the blockchain to randomly distribute orders For miners, customers cannot designate miners to take orders, reducing the situation of spontaneous grabbing. That's enough security and decentralization.

Center or go to the center, the discussion on this topic has not stopped.

Some community members do not deny that Filecoin mining may form a situation monopolized by a small number of large miners, similar to the current Bitcoin mining computing power concentrated in several large mining pools.

But he also said that Filecoin mining still has great advantages compared to the current centralized storage solution, because both IPFS and Filecoin are open source projects. Although the code is in the hands of the project party, developers can also To submit the code, it is equivalent to the role of the referee played by many people; and the miners who earn a large proportion of FIL, the miners may be individuals or commercial organizations, acting as athletes. This clear structure balances the high concentration of power in centralized storage solutions.

The person in charge of the FileCombo community/Cobang supercomputing technology believes that from a technical point of view, Filecoin is a distributed storage network architecture, and it is indeed a decentralized route; however, other factors will be involved in its implementation, such as official regulations. Only those who have reached a certain computing power are eligible to obtain block rewards. In the competition, big miners have more advantages, which means that whoever has more financial resources has more right to speak. From this perspective, it means centralization.

Others feel that discussing whether Filecoin is decentralized still needs to be viewed dialectically. Decentralization and community governance are a gradual process. For example, in the space race before the mainnet launch, since there is no real order demand, robots are needed to issue orders. "In terms of concept, Filecoin has been exploring decentralization. There may be some centralized designs in the early stage, but they can be gradually improved." 

The more discussions there are before the mainnet goes live, the more scrutiny Filecoin will attract. As for whether it can meet the expectations of supporters, the results after the mainnet launch will be more clear.

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