5 ms·

“Within 24h of launch a majority of miners are already on strike” Consequences?

105 points by 1qazxsw23edc 6y ago

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
This is hard for me to follow, but this is what I was able to gather: Filecoin developers have set expensive hardware requirements to be a Filecoin miner, as well as expensive staking requirements. The mining is also highly centralized with insiders. Third party miners are disappointed because they can't mine despite costly investments. Is this summary correct? My take on possible consequences: no one likes excessive centralization in a crypto commodity. This hurts the adoption and value of Filecoin. Filecoin miners and investors may also dump Filecoin holdings.
- vecio 6y ago
  Centralization of Filecoin is an issue, but not the point of these tweets. The tweets focus on rekt Filecoin miners, they have spent more than $200M on hardware, but seems impossible to get back that with FIL mining, and since most miners are from China, no west media report this thing yet.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    My question is, why did the miners not anticipate this- aren't the rules more or less agreed to in advance? Or were the rules changed out from under them? Or is this something nobody anticipated would be an issue?
    - vecio 6y ago
      Like in the tweets, many miners don't understand this, nobody tell them the risks in the community, not even the Protocol Labs. I think mining equipments are over sold, maybe 10 times, due to the lack of enough warnings.
    - vecio 6y ago
      Most miners thought they bought 10TB storage, they will mine $FIL with that 10TB, but according to the rules, they can only start from like 1TB, most of the storage they bought are useless for mining.
  - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    Well, they can always sell their hardware as it's generic server equipment right? They can also sell their FIL holdings.
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      Its almost always specialized cause crypto mining software for proof of work extensively uses GPU to increase hashes per second rate.
      - rsa25519 6y ago
        This is filecoin. Afaik it's storage-based, not compute-based.
        jdmichal 6y ago
        I looked at the requirements earlier and was blown away. Their official recommendation is three servers with some very expensive hardware. Three Epyc processors, one machine with 128GB of RAM (and a lot more swap space), and one with 2x GPUs. And all that to "seal" like one TB an hour. But it's OK, because this is totally not a proof of work system. https://filecoin.io/vintage/mining-hardware-config-testnet-v3.pdf https://filecoin.io/vintage/mining-hardware-config-testnet-v...
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        How often (on average?) do you need to seal each TB you have? For example if it's four months and you can do a terabyte per hour then that's about 3 petabytes and the cost of the sealing servers is a small fraction of the cost of the storage server. Is it much less? But also the tweet says something about one terabyte per day?
        iamnotnicola 6y ago
        You only seal (the expensive operation) when you add power. Once you stop sealing you don't need to seal again for ~1 year (depending on your sector lifetime). Keeping storage power is a cheap computation in comparison.
  - noxer 6y ago
    Regardless of the actual reason why they cant use the 200M hardware, isnt int kinda funny that they even assumed that they could make money from the full capacity at day 1. Who the heck would be the customer of cloud storage hardware worth 200M at day 1. Clearly demand grows over time, that cant be skipped. Reward "miners" for whatever they provide even if no one uses it - sound unsustainable.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Rewarding miners for reserved but unused capacity is an explicit feature of Filecoin that I guess is intended to build up capacity in advance of customer need. These miners just did what Protocol Labs told them to do.
      - noxer 6y ago
        Reserves sure, but at the start you dont know how much is needed so to just assume reward for whatever show up is comically naive. It could take months for real demand actually using a significant portion of the storage. Pay everyone else anyway is literally trowing money away. Just imagine if one of the large cloud storage player would have set this up and simply offered all their reserves which they could do as there is no way anyone would use it. If they would get paid for that It would be very lucrative.
      - znpy 6y ago
        > These miners just did what Protocol Labs told them to do. Without a contract? I'm not talking about smart contracts, I'm talking about real world, legally-binding contract. If they just went and bought $200M USD of hardware basing on marketing... I guess that's the problem, right there.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    It’s highly unlikely that they would get their money back if they lived in the west either. Most victims of crypto currency fraud are not made whole. Genuinely not sure why people keep falling for this though.
jordhy 6y ago
But how come this issue didn't come up in the calibration/testnet?
- jordhy 6y ago
  Found a very relevant thread here: https://twitter.com/NicoDeva_/status/1317689811046522880 https://twitter.com/NicoDeva_/status/1317689811046522880
  - soneca 6y ago
    We got an infinite loop here
- wmf 6y ago
  Yeah, if these numbers are correct I'm not sure why Protocol Labs didn't run the numbers ahead of time and predict this situation. Or maybe they did and they just don't care. Crypto miners have become spoiled by ROI measured in months, so when something comes along that looks like a real business the miners cry foul.
afrojack123 6y ago
I'll say it louder for the people in the back. Decentralization is inefficient. Chinese miners won't be allowed.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Putting the cluster in cluster.
sbierwagen 6y ago
https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-miners-go-on-strike-one-day-after-mainnet-launch-prompting-early-reward-release https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-miners-go-on-strike-one-da... Coindesk post.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mariopt 6y ago
Glad I dodged this bullet. Last year I dedicated my Intel Nuc i3, 8 gb Ram with a 500gb hard drive but the amount of files/contracts was so low that eventually I shut it down. I'm very surprised about the 128 gigs of ram requirement, guess this network isn't that decentralized as promised. Anyway, from the beginning it easy to see that competing against something like AWS S3 would be super super hard if not impossible. With a low token price, electricity costs, hardware costs and your ISP asking about your absurd bandwidth use, I would be shocked if anyone can actually make a profit on this.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  What did you expect in terms of revenue offering 500 GB to the network?
  - mariopt 6y ago
    I was just testing the waters, the idea seems futurist and reasonable. The price of token wasn't set back then and the company decided to inject some capital with a fixed return over a period of 2 year I believe, don't remember the amount but I know it was very generous.
throwaway4good 6y ago
"Filecoin is very complex and requires high-end hardware, including min 128GB mem." Why is Filecoin so complex? If they require coins to be staked in order to offer storage to the network anyways.
edf13 6y ago
Hardware requirements... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#specific-operation-requirements https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#specifi... This note hasn’t aged well... > Filecoin allows to launch a small cloud storage business for a few thousand dollars directly from home, where it would cost millions in infrastructure and logistics to get off the ground in the current data hosting model.
marknadal 6y ago
Why is HN mods keeping this off the homepage? Oh wait, cause YC invested in Filecoin parent company.
throwaway4good 6y ago
Why is this called a "strike"? When the issue seems to be miners unwillingness to buy Filecoin in order to join the network. Simply seems to be an issue of the price, risk/reward ratio of buying a "ticket to mine".
esotericimpl 6y ago
These guys are just like the clowns on Wall Street with their magical mortgage money machine in the 2000s. Why can’t i turn electricity into money by doing zero work. Incredible to me that this hasn’t imploded yet. Soon, but not yet.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
znpy 6y ago
I'm looking forward on James Mickens commenting this.

105 points by 1qazxsw23edc 6y ago

This is hard for me to follow, but this is what I was able to gather: Filecoin developers have set expensive hardware requirements to be a Filecoin miner, as well as expensive staking requirements. The mining is also highly centralized with insiders. Third party miners are disappointed because they can't mine despite costly investments. Is this summary correct? My take on possible consequences: no one likes excessive centralization in a crypto commodity. This hurts the adoption and value of Filecoin. Filecoin miners and investors may also dump Filecoin holdings.

vecio 6y ago
Centralization of Filecoin is an issue, but not the point of these tweets. The tweets focus on rekt Filecoin miners, they have spent more than $200M on hardware, but seems impossible to get back that with FIL mining, and since most miners are from China, no west media report this thing yet.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  My question is, why did the miners not anticipate this- aren't the rules more or less agreed to in advance? Or were the rules changed out from under them? Or is this something nobody anticipated would be an issue?
  - vecio 6y ago
    Like in the tweets, many miners don't understand this, nobody tell them the risks in the community, not even the Protocol Labs. I think mining equipments are over sold, maybe 10 times, due to the lack of enough warnings.
  - vecio 6y ago
    Most miners thought they bought 10TB storage, they will mine $FIL with that 10TB, but according to the rules, they can only start from like 1TB, most of the storage they bought are useless for mining.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  Well, they can always sell their hardware as it's generic server equipment right? They can also sell their FIL holdings.
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    Its almost always specialized cause crypto mining software for proof of work extensively uses GPU to increase hashes per second rate.
    - rsa25519 6y ago
      This is filecoin. Afaik it's storage-based, not compute-based.
      - jdmichal 6y ago
        I looked at the requirements earlier and was blown away. Their official recommendation is three servers with some very expensive hardware. Three Epyc processors, one machine with 128GB of RAM (and a lot more swap space), and one with 2x GPUs. And all that to "seal" like one TB an hour. But it's OK, because this is totally not a proof of work system. https://filecoin.io/vintage/mining-hardware-config-testnet-v3.pdf https://filecoin.io/vintage/mining-hardware-config-testnet-v...
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        How often (on average?) do you need to seal each TB you have? For example if it's four months and you can do a terabyte per hour then that's about 3 petabytes and the cost of the sealing servers is a small fraction of the cost of the storage server. Is it much less? But also the tweet says something about one terabyte per day?
        iamnotnicola 6y ago
        You only seal (the expensive operation) when you add power. Once you stop sealing you don't need to seal again for ~1 year (depending on your sector lifetime). Keeping storage power is a cheap computation in comparison.
- noxer 6y ago
  Regardless of the actual reason why they cant use the 200M hardware, isnt int kinda funny that they even assumed that they could make money from the full capacity at day 1. Who the heck would be the customer of cloud storage hardware worth 200M at day 1. Clearly demand grows over time, that cant be skipped. Reward "miners" for whatever they provide even if no one uses it - sound unsustainable.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Rewarding miners for reserved but unused capacity is an explicit feature of Filecoin that I guess is intended to build up capacity in advance of customer need. These miners just did what Protocol Labs told them to do.
    - noxer 6y ago
      Reserves sure, but at the start you dont know how much is needed so to just assume reward for whatever show up is comically naive. It could take months for real demand actually using a significant portion of the storage. Pay everyone else anyway is literally trowing money away. Just imagine if one of the large cloud storage player would have set this up and simply offered all their reserves which they could do as there is no way anyone would use it. If they would get paid for that It would be very lucrative.
    - znpy 6y ago
      > These miners just did what Protocol Labs told them to do. Without a contract? I'm not talking about smart contracts, I'm talking about real world, legally-binding contract. If they just went and bought $200M USD of hardware basing on marketing... I guess that's the problem, right there.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It’s highly unlikely that they would get their money back if they lived in the west either. Most victims of crypto currency fraud are not made whole. Genuinely not sure why people keep falling for this though.

jordhy 6y ago

But how come this issue didn't come up in the calibration/testnet?

jordhy 6y ago
Found a very relevant thread here: https://twitter.com/NicoDeva_/status/1317689811046522880 https://twitter.com/NicoDeva_/status/1317689811046522880
- soneca 6y ago
  We got an infinite loop here
wmf 6y ago
Yeah, if these numbers are correct I'm not sure why Protocol Labs didn't run the numbers ahead of time and predict this situation. Or maybe they did and they just don't care. Crypto miners have become spoiled by ROI measured in months, so when something comes along that looks like a real business the miners cry foul.

afrojack123 6y ago

I'll say it louder for the people in the back. Decentralization is inefficient. Chinese miners won't be allowed.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

Putting the cluster in cluster.

sbierwagen 6y ago

https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-miners-go-on-strike-one-day-after-mainnet-launch-prompting-early-reward-release https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-miners-go-on-strike-one-da... Coindesk post.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mariopt 6y ago

Glad I dodged this bullet. Last year I dedicated my Intel Nuc i3, 8 gb Ram with a 500gb hard drive but the amount of files/contracts was so low that eventually I shut it down. I'm very surprised about the 128 gigs of ram requirement, guess this network isn't that decentralized as promised. Anyway, from the beginning it easy to see that competing against something like AWS S3 would be super super hard if not impossible. With a low token price, electricity costs, hardware costs and your ISP asking about your absurd bandwidth use, I would be shocked if anyone can actually make a profit on this.

throwaway4good 6y ago
What did you expect in terms of revenue offering 500 GB to the network?
- mariopt 6y ago
  I was just testing the waters, the idea seems futurist and reasonable. The price of token wasn't set back then and the company decided to inject some capital with a fixed return over a period of 2 year I believe, don't remember the amount but I know it was very generous.

throwaway4good 6y ago

"Filecoin is very complex and requires high-end hardware, including min 128GB mem." Why is Filecoin so complex? If they require coins to be staked in order to offer storage to the network anyways.

edf13 6y ago

Hardware requirements... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#specific-operation-requirements https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/#specifi... This note hasn’t aged well... > Filecoin allows to launch a small cloud storage business for a few thousand dollars directly from home, where it would cost millions in infrastructure and logistics to get off the ground in the current data hosting model.

marknadal 6y ago

Why is HN mods keeping this off the homepage? Oh wait, cause YC invested in Filecoin parent company.

throwaway4good 6y ago

Why is this called a "strike"? When the issue seems to be miners unwillingness to buy Filecoin in order to join the network. Simply seems to be an issue of the price, risk/reward ratio of buying a "ticket to mine".

esotericimpl 6y ago

These guys are just like the clowns on Wall Street with their magical mortgage money machine in the 2000s. Why can’t i turn electricity into money by doing zero work. Incredible to me that this hasn’t imploded yet. Soon, but not yet.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

znpy 6y ago

I'm looking forward on James Mickens commenting this.