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From YouTube: Filecoin Mining Community Call - July 2020

Description

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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction - Aayush Rajasekaran
01:27 Filecoin Overview - Protocolin
12:50 Getting Ready for the Space Race - Ian Darrow
20:56 Network Calibration cameo - Molly Mackinlay
23:23 Community Questions & Answers - Aayush Rajasekaran

A

Hello everyone.. Thank you for joining our july mining community call.

A

It is 9:00 p.m. here in ottawa in canada,, where I am.

A

Thanks for joining- and I hope everyone's doing, well.

A

I feel like I always start these things by saying it's an exciting time in filecoin land. well,, it's an especially exciting time in the filecoin world, right now,, as I'm sure all of you are aware..

A

We launched our calibration test network yesterday.

A

And we've already got tons of miners signing up on it.

A

A lot of new code is going live with this new test network.

A

And of course,, this is the code say for bug, fixes that we plan on deploying for the space race, competition,.

A

Which starts in under two weeks from now.

A

Really, really soon., so yeah, lots is happening and we're gonna be hearing lots about that in today's call.

A

We're hearing from a few different people, today,.

A

All of whom should be familiar, faces.

A

We'll be hearing from colin, from ian and molly.

A

And then we'll do some q and a, some pre-submitted questions at the end of the call.

A

Yeah,, thanks again to everyone who joins., I hope everyone's staying safe during these crazy times.

A

And we'll start off with colin giving us a overview of filecoin and some updates that he'd like to share.

B

Welcome everyone., my name is colin, but my friends call me protocolin or filecolin, and I'm the ecosystem lead for the filecoin project..

B

I wanna say huge. Thank you to everyone joining us on the call today and for all the miners participating in the filecoin ecosystem through testnet and beyond.

B

Today, we'll do a quick overview of filecoin,, our testnet and our recent ecosystem. Growth.

B

So first I'll touch on why the filecoin project exists.

B

Filecoin's mission is to create a decentralized,, efficient and robust foundation for humanity's information.

B

We truly believe humanity's most valuable resource is information, and we're incredibly passionate about storing and protecting that valuable resource in an efficiently priced and distributed way.

B

Now,, what this really means is addressing some of the major problems with today's storage infrastructure, decentralizing, the cloud away from a small number of centralized providers,, giving users full control over their data, turning data storage pricing into an efficient market,, allowing the network to set prices rather than corporate pricing. Departments,, making storage verifiable to ensure when someone says they're, storing your data,, they actually are, and lastly,. Optimizing the world's storage,, putting the zettabytes of latent storage capacity around the world to work.

B

now,. What this means for miners is that we move from a world where just a few small number of cloud storage companies.

B

Control how your data is stored and priced to a completely global open market, where anyone can become a cloud storage, provider.

B

Where the network itself can store content on every corner,, bringing content right to the edge where it's needed the most by a set of clients.

B

More specifically, when a client wants to store data,.

B

Miners first compete to win that storage, contract,.

B

And then they must prove that they're storing the data properly over time.

B

and then finally, to retrieve content,.

B

A client will find a set of miners with the data and select the fastest and most affordable one to retrieve it.

B

For miners there's an absolutely huge opportunity to earn filecoin for hosting files and providing a valuable service to the network.

B

So next I wanted to talk a little bit about the business case for filecoin.

B

first,. The amount of data stored in data centers is growing very rapidly in its current state.

B

about 36% a year and we're in the tens of zettabytes currently,, which is a lot of data.. But what's interesting is that the amount of usable data created per year far outpaces the capacity of those data centers.

B

So we need a different model here and filecoin presents a different approach by transforming the fundamental business case.

B

And cost structure to be a data storage provider,, which currently involves a lot of these things that you see on the screen, here.

B

And instead really allows storage providers.

B

To focus on the core business backend,, a subset of the most valuable tasks, a storage provider can do and offload the business front end to the filecoin network. Itself.

B

so similar to the powerful service airbnb's network provides for its individual homeowners,.

B

That allows them to compete with hotels,.

B

We provide that same service as a network for storage providers., and so we take a market with some very dominant cloud storage providers. Today.

B

And allow all sorts of data storage providers to be able to compete effectively with the scale and reliability and price efficiency of the larger players..

B

And so that allows anyone from smaller mining rigs to really advanced data centers around the world.

B

To plug into the network and together provide a really robust foundation.

B

For humanity's information.

B

Now, I want to spend a few minutes talking about some of the incredible momentum we see on the current testnet. on the testnet. Today we have over 200 repos across the core protocol, filecoin proofs,.

B

Developer, tooling, and apis and products and applications.

B

We're actually working on four implementations of the filecoin protocol,, many of which are through external parties in golang,, rust and simpleplus..

B

We have over 1,350 cumulative oss contributors.

B

That have contributed to the filecoin protocol in github repos,, outside of the protocol labs team.

B

And many of those run extremely amazing.

B

Global filecoin communities all around the world,.

B

That are now happening more virtually,, but also in person in some regions..

B

One of those amazing summits that happened recently was the ipfs ecology industry summit co-hosted by ipfs news.

B

That was an incredible success.. There was six to 700 participants and a lot of really good information about ipfs and filecoin..

B

Our current testnet has over 25 petabytes of proven storage on it, today,, which is absolutely incredible.. That's a new high watermark for us.

B

and to put that in context,, most of web3 can actually fit into less than a petabytes worth of data., and so this is the spans and spectrum.

B

from small miners to large professional mining. Facilities,.

B

Many of which you see displayed here., and so when you take a look at the miners all over the world and all of the community of miners that are on the filecoin testnet today,.

B

This is just a small set of logos that represent who those miners are.

B

and that community is absolutely thriving..

B

We're so excited to see more and more miners appear all over the world and plug into the filecoin storage network to earn filecoin.

B

And provide valuable services to the network.

B

in parallel, during testnet,. We also are running hackfs,, which is a one month, long hackathon on filepoint.

B

477 hackers have stake and are actively participating in it,.

B

And that represents 225 project teams.

B

That are actively hacking from categories like smart contracts on filecoin,.

B

Defi on filecoin, large data, sets, video,, audio, use cases, et cetera.

B

And, of course, we're getting ready for space race,, which we'll talk about later in this meeting.

B

finally,, just a snapshot of our public roadmap that you can see linked from one of our blog posts.

B

And it represents the mainnet launch window,, which is august 31st to september 21st of this year..

B

So it's coming up real soon..

B

Next, I wanted to touch on the filecoin ecosystem., one of my favorite topics to talk about.

B

and beyond the ecosystem of miners,, which many of us are familiar. With,, there's actually an incredible ecosystem of applications and clients, token infrastructure,.

B

Developer tooling, protocol implementations, infrastructure,.

B

And collaborators that is growing significantly every month.

B

We have over 60 active collaborations, today,.

B

And many, many more to announce in the coming weeks, which I'm really, really excited about., and so I'm gonna rapid fire through some of these examples.

B

In each category and I'll highlight a few of these, every mining call we do each month.

B

So, starting with applications and clients.

B

first,, it's definitely worth mentioning that ipfs is an incredibly important part.

B

Of the filecoin ecosystem, and the ecosystem of applications on ipfs are actively awaiting filecoin as a persistent storage mechanism for their applications, and we're making it easy for them to integrate..

B

So these will all be important. Parts of the filecoin ecosystem, very soon.

B

I'll highlight a few today., openbazaar and haven are integrating filecoin.

B

As a payments mechanism in their decentralized marketplace, and they just finished their trezor block book implementation milestone last week., so soon, they'll have filecoin payments integrated into the haven marketplace,, which is super exciting.

B

fleek introduced space daemon,, which basically packages together,, ipfs, textile,.

B

Threads and buckets, powergate and filecoin.

B

Into one, easy to install js interface.

B

That makes it seamless for developers to build peer-to-peer and privacy focused applications on that stack.

B

We have two video applications in the works.

B

voodify and build labs that are using both filecoin and livepeer to build decentralized, video streaming applications.

B

Starling is building an application to store large verifiable archival data sets on filecoin.

B

And of course, filecoin discover will see the network with many really valuable data sets.

B

And very many culturally important data sets,, including many of the logos that you see here.

B

In terms of developer, tooling, powergate is one of the most popular developer. Toolkits.

B

On filecoin today., we have dozens of developers already using powergate.

B

And hundreds of hackers on hack fs using it as well.

B

And it basically allows any developer to deploy a multi, tiered storage across filecoin and ipfs.

B

It makes it really, really easy for developers to integrate with that.

B

Truffle recently announced and released preserve,, which simplifies the process of preserving long lived application, data on ipfs and filecoin and truffle's also working on a ganache integration,.

B

Which enables devs to spin up a local filecoin simulator.

B

For quick development and testing., that's super exciting., open work. Labs is another team that has deployed a ton of tooling relating to wallets,, verified clients and node infrastructure across the stack.

B

and finally, protoschool has released a set of courses to onboard new developers onto filecoin,, which teaches them some of the primitives that they need to know as they're getting started.

B

and finally,. In terms of token infrastructure,, there's a number of wallets in active development,, including metamask,, who actually recently demoed an awesome, filecoin integration in it's an alpha release using testnet.

B

Glif,, which is a self hosted web wallet.

B

That integrates with the ledger: hardware, wallet, integration,.

B

And a number of custody solutions, that will be available on filecoin launch,, including coinbase, custody,, gemini, custody, and anchorage as well,, which is exciting.

B

So that was a quick rapid fire view of just a few ecosystem examples.

B

it's hard to go through everything in one session,, but I am super excited to share more use, cases,, more collaborations, and more applications on top of filecoin. Next time we meet.

B

there's lots and lots of data to report on.

B

And so finally,, I just wanted to leave everyone with a heartfelt thank you to the organizations and individuals that are so committed to the development of the filecoin mining ecosystem..

B

Obviously, this is just a few logos and a subset of logos and individuals that have been active on our slack and our communities and our github repos and actively mining testnet.

B

So we want to say thank you for believing in our mission, for growing our miner community, and for investing in our testnet to make it safe and secure..

B

You're all helping make filecoin a reality,.

B

And we're super excited and grateful to be building alongside you.

B

thank you, and I'll pass it back to aayush.

A

Thank you,, colin. gosh,. I feel like every time we get a lot of these ecosystem updates,. The picture of all of the logos just gets bigger and bigger,.

A

And it is always very cool to just see how many people,.

A

How many projects and how many partnerships are going into making filecoin a reality.

A

And as he said, thank you to everyone, that's been a part of it.

A

Next up,, we have ian who will be talking about space race.

A

We know that this is very much the focus of a lot of the mining community right now,, so he's got a ton of information and some resources for you., so cue to you.

C

Awesome, thanks so much aayush.

C

yeah,, so my name is ian darrow.. I head up the filecoin operations side of the house.

C

And I'm here to give you a little bit more detail on the filecoin space race,.

C

The first steps of which are underway now, which will be kicking off soon.

C

So filecoin space race, for those who aren't aware already.

C

Is a three week: competition where we're challenging miners to add sealed storage to the network as well as provide all of the sort of storage and retrieval operations that we'll expect of participants on the filecoin mainnet.

C

participants are competing across the world.

C

For different reward, pools that are available both globally and to each of the six continents, excluding antarctica.

C

and folks, are competing for total potential storage rewards.

C

Across all the different regions of 4 million filecoin.

C

Throughout the course of the competition,, there will be a live leaderboard where miners can display their names or their companies in the rankings to sort of demonstrate how much they're contributing and how much they're working towards the overall strength of the filecoin network.

C

And yeah,, it's worth noting that, in addition to just adding storage as part of the competition,, miners also have to accept lots and lots of storage and retrieval deals. Just like will be happening during mainevent.

C

One exciting new piece to announce is that, since this competition rolled out, we're excited to be introducing an additional, a hundred thousand filecoin, that's available to be split between the top 20 block reward winners..

C

So we tracking block rewards on the mainnet in the same way that we would be on the mainnet, and the folks who are the most productive will be able to split that additional reward. Pool.

C

So, to get a little bit deeper into the mechanics of the competition,, the primary metric that we're basing rewards on is a metric called raw bytes storage power..

C

So this is essentially the number of sectors.

C

That the miner has committed to the network or the total amount of storage power they've put into what are called committed capacity sectors.

C

In addition to measuring as raw byte storage, power grows,.

C

The miner's share of the total reward pool and out of the global or their regional pool will increase.

C

In addition to measuring miners rat byte storage power.

C

Miners also compete on a metric called deal. Success rate.

C

Deal success rate, you can think of as sort of a pass fail..

C

So what we'll be doing is that there will actually be a bot running.

C

and as soon as a miner has any storage power on the network.

C

That's running for the space race,, then this bot will start attempting storage deals with that miner, and once files have been stored,, it was start attempting. Retrievable deals and miners will have to complete a certain percentage of these storage or travel deals successfully in order to be eligible for rewards.

C

There's one smaller piece of the competition. there's a set of operations in filecoin called sector life cycle operations., without going into too much detail on this call.

C

This is basically the process of converting storage.

C

That you've proven to the network is available into storage. That's storing files for real, people.

C

and there'll be other written materials. You can use to sort of get through the exact requirements. Here.

C

But it's also part of the competition.

C

and then finally,, as I mentioned before,.

C

There's an interesting sort of slight mismatch between the testnet structure and the mainnet structure.

C

Basically, what we're doing is introducing a reward for the top 20 block reward producers during the competition just to make sure that there are the correct incentives.

C

To submit as any blocks as you can to the network,, instead of just adding storage into other people's blocks.

C

With that said, we've gotten a lot of questions about the space race through our community channels.

C

people are really excited., there's a ton of interest., and so I'd like to take this chance to address some of the most common questions.

C

A lot of folks have asked us, what are the regions for the competition or which region is my country in??

C

So the regions are the six continents, excluding antarctica.

C

So north america,, south america,, africa,, asia,, europe, and oceania..

C

If you go to the filecoin blog,, there's a post called announcing filecoins testnet incentives and there's a link in that post.

C

That will actually give you a list of the countries in each region..

C

So if you live somewhere, that's on the border of one region and another, feel free to just take a look at that list and you can figure out exactly where you're landing.

C

Lots of folks have asked if I'm in china or otherwise behind sort of a challenging network situation of any sort,.

C

Do I need a vpn to receive deals?.

C

Unfortunately, it's hard for us to say it without being at your individual computer. people have lots of different sort of networks situations., so our advice is just to set up a network connection.

C

That makes you confident that you can receive and make connections to lots of people all around the world.. Just like you would, if you were trying to compete for storage deals on mainnet.

C

Is there a minimum miner size to receive rewards?

C

so for space? Race, there's been some confusion about this.

C

for space race. There is not a minimum miner size to be eligible to receive rewards. however,. Remember that space race rewards only go to the top hundred miners globally, the top 50 miners in each region., so that said,, if you're in a region that sees less mining for some reason,, you could mind even one sector on space race,.

C

And still be eligible to receive rewards.

C

Could registration for the space race. so maybe on intuitively?

C

You do not have to preregister for the space race.

C

once the competition starts, there'll be a dashboard that automatically attracts every single miner, with any storage power on the competition network.

C

You'll just be able to visit that dashboard and you'll get some instructions to claim your miner by signing a message through your lotus client.

C

You have to provide an email and some other information,, and then your miner information will be associated on that dashboard and you'll be ready to go., separate question,, so once you've registered.

C

Supposing that you are eligible for rewards at the end of the competition,, how will aml and kyc work to receive those rewards?.

C

So if you're eligible, we're working with our friends at coinlist,.

C

And they'll reach out to you through the email that you use to register and they'll help you get onboarded. So we can add your rewards to the genesis block.

C

in general,, they're gonna ask you for a government issued photo id, and other types of things that you would provide to an exchange and they may ask you for some additional details.

C

Right, so because there are regional reward, pools, we've gotten a lot of questions about how we're going to confirm the locations of miners.

C

The first thing to note is that confirmation isn't required for either the global pool.

C

Or for the regional pool., that's the most competitive region, because there are no incentives to sort of cheat and try to join those regions, right?

C

for folks in other regions,, either during, or right after the competition ends,. We're gonna send an email to that registered email address with some instructions.

C

we're not disclosing these instructions ahead of time, because it's important that folks have a pretty short amount of time to respond., but suffice it to say, we're gonna use a combination of technical and the real world physical measures to verify. Folks locations., please remember the integrity of this competition is really, really important..

C

It's gonna be a huge kickstart to the entire filecoin network and the longterm. Success or failure of the network can really be affected.. So we do take folks attempting to fake their location, really seriously,.

C

And if we aren't able to verify you successfully,, then we will publicly ban your miner from the competition,.

C

And you'll be disqualified from receiving any rewards across any of your miners..

C

A lot of folks have asked so for people who are running smaller machines,, but many of them,. A lot of people have asked us if we can combine miner actors into one for purposes of the competition.

C

and yes, we're happy to help with that.. So it's built into the dashboard already.. We can combine up to 16 actors for you just 'cause, it's a manual process that we have to do on our end..

C

So what you should do is just register all of your miners using the same email address and then drop us a note in the space race channel on the filecoin slack. we'll be happy to help you with that.

C

and finally,. We had a lot of test questions about how we can test the space race, competition, or how folks can test to make sure their setups work. and to answer this,.

C

I'm going to yield the floor to my colleague, molly mckinley.

D

By popular request and by the set of people who have been been asking for this,.

D

And wanting more time to test all of the new things that have landed in the network in the last couple of weeks, and we've created a space race calibration period.

D

So a two week period ahead of the actual competition launch.

D

Where we're running competition ready code in the network,.

D

So that folks can perform in real conditions.

D

And also test against things like the dashboards and bots.

D

And other things that ian was mentioning., and so, if you wanna go and join the space race channel.

D

And come on to the calibration dev net,, which has a ton of new features and goodies that have been added over the past week or so,.

D

There's a lot of activity happening there. already. A lot of folks are participating. There.

D

A reminder of what this time is meant to be used. For.

D

By the way,, here's all of the places where you can get.

D

there's a calibration network with all of the information,, a stats dashboard and the faucet..

D

But this is really a time to stress test. Everything.

D

In general,, space race itself is a great time to test the network before it goes live., but additionally,. This calibration period is for us to hammer out all of the rough edges.

D

And make sure that everything is running smoothly ahead of the competition itself..

D

A lot of things have changed from an implementation perspective over the last couple of weeks., and so we recognize that we need time to hammer out issues.

D

And also miners need time to modify and stress test their code to make sure that it is running smoothly., and so this is an opportunity for everyone to make sure that we are ready to go for actual competition launch, which is coming soon,.

D

Coming the week of august 3rd., and so everyone can use this devnet- that we've set up.

D

To prepare and test ahead of that.

A

Great, thank you, molly.

D

A

I'll reiterate what she said.

A

calibration net is now live, and everyone should totally be checking it out,, trying to break it and trying to get their setups running perfectly, because that'll put you and the system in the best place for when the competition starts and ultimately for mainnet itself.

A

Great,, I think that's all of our presenters for today.

A

We do have some questions that were submitted by folks in the community that I would like to go over..

A

Let me just pull up some slides for that.

A

perfect.. So let's go over these..

A

These are questions that were submitted from folks in the mining community. Like I said., so here's one.. Why does the space race only reward a limited number of miners instead of all participants?.

A

A totally fair question. and honestly, it comes down to the manual aspect of space race.

A

As we had mentioned,, we will be doing know your customer process.

A

On anyone who's receiving the awards and at that point you just hit a button., and so we can't be doing that for a very large number of participants.

A

However, miners should be earning rewards.

A

Even if there are various different scales of their mining operations based on their regions,.

A

And based on their setup.

A

so, yeah., what's the determining factor for the space race, success rate or storage, power?.

A

I think ian went into this in some detail. Already., but yeah, like he said to reiterate: miners earn rewards based on the amount of storage that they commit and prove on the network, but also need to be meeting a certain deal. Success rate., that's what storage and retrieval being challenged by a bot to make sure that those deals are working.

A

Which lotus branch will be used for space race?, so the calibration network that's now live is using the branch called ntwk dash calibration,.

A

And we'll be pushing critical bug fixes to that as needed.

A

We don't have the branch for the actual space race, competition, itself.

A

It'll probably be called something along those lines.

A

say: ntwk dash incentive net or something like that.

A

But that will be announced ahead of time before the competition starts.

A

Are we able to confirm if the minimum requirements for space race has been reconsidered to 10 terabytes?, so again,? This is something that ian already touched. On,.

A

Reiterating there isn't a minimum miner size to be eligible for space, race rewards itself., you can earn rewards if you commit a single sector, essentially.

A

The exception to that is the top 20 block reward producers.

A

Getting the bonus reward.

A

that threshold is still somewhat flexible.

A

But at the very least, we feel that 20 biggest miners.

A

By storage, power will be meeting what that threshold is.

A

When will the specific parameters of the economic model be announced?, a good question.? So this is something that a lot of time and attention is going into..

A

A lot of work has already been done on it, and it is alive in the latest code.

A

There are still draft parameters, however.

A

We need to take in lots of factors as we get closer and closer to mainnet, and the numbers themselves will evolve,.

A

But we'll definitely keep everyone posted as that happens, put out more information about how these decisions are being made,, as well as when the numbers are finally finalized.

A

Can a small or medium sized business be profitable?

A

As a storage miner?, I would say definitely yes,, especially when you contrast filecoin with other blockchains., specifically proof of work. Blockchains.

A

It does require some specialized hardware,.

A

But it's still ultimately very widely reliable commodity, hardware. you're not buying anything. That's gonna be specifically designed for filecoin mining.

A

And so I think, a small or medium sized business.

A

Could certainly operate as a filecoin storage, miner.

A

Here's a question. we have equipment set up in two different data, centers.

A

In the same city., could we combine the source powers of these two sets??

A

I assume this question is about space race again, but within the context of space, race, yes.

A

As ian mentioned,, you can combine up to 16 miners.

A

For the purpose of the competition.

A

And to do so, but be sure to registered them with the same email address and let us know in space race, and that should be enough to take care of it..

A

We have question,, where is the bot based? Would miners from china need vpn to receive deals sent for the bot??

A

The bot is based in europe.

A

and again, ian touched on this., it's a little hard to say exactly what set up every miner is going to need in order to be able to receive deals to be sent from the bot..

A

That's what part of what we want people to be doing during this two week, period. find the setup that works for you., make you've got lots of filecoin peers,.

A

Make sure you're able to connect well to the network.

A

It's hard to say what any specific individual connection needs, unfortunately.

A

Will the discovered disc skip the seal stage on mainnet?.

A

No, not at all.. You will still definitely have to see a lot of that data before it can come. Alive. there's no getting around that.

A

Do we have the latest benchmarks on hardware?.

A

Well, we're always getting in new benchmarks from our community, essentially every day.

A

and the links to where you can find those are on this slide.. We also do have some that have come from our own designs,.

A

As well as some rough outlines that are for machines that are working well.

A

For testing and small scale mining.

A

But I would encourage everyone to continue to run their own benchmarks to submit those results and give as much information to each other as possible..

A

And we'll add the standard disclaimer that protocol labs itself or the filecoin project itself.

A

Will not be giving any specific recommendations., but the goal is to provide as much information as possible and folks can make their own decisions..

A

And I think that's all the questions we have.

A

So I guess I'll say...

A

I don't know if I can. there, we go.

A

yeah,, so thank you, everyone who joined., hopefully this was informative,, answered some questions that you had, and also just got everyone excited for the next few weeks and the next month.

A

And a couple of months from the filecoin project,, which are gonna, be very, very exciting..

A

Everyone working on filecoin cannot wait to put this out there to the world and see how it goes, and I'm sure everyone in the community feels the same way.

A

Thank you, as always for your patience,, for your continued support, for helping find bugs, for suggesting improvements,.

A

And latest of all for participating.

A

In the calibration network and space race, a couple of weeks from now. we're very excited,, we're very grateful for your support.

A

And we'll see how the next few weeks go.

A

It's gonna be a fun time., see you everyone. good night,, good morning., take care.