Filecoin test network is about to go live, these changes need attention

Tomorrow morning, the Filecoin project will launch a testnet. For such a heavyweight project, the impact on the future will be huge. We first contacted Zhang Yong of Filcloud and learned that there are several major changes in the current stage. The miner manufacturers, miners and other roles have very important significance.

1. Change of block production time

The entire block production time changed from 30 seconds to 45 seconds!

This means that the official team's insistence on ecological open compatibility. Based on security and efficiency considerations a month ago, the official team added support for GPUs, resulting in unstable block time and high hardware requirements, which means a lot of low configuration The machine was rejected, and today's adjustments can allow more users to participate in the block competition! More in line with the spirit of the blockchain

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2. Sector size determination

It is determined that it is 1GB and 32GB, which will have relatively high memory requirements, especially for 32GB sectors, which means that to produce this type of block requires at least 256G of memory, which is a challenge for miners' costs.

3. The latest optimization of space-time proof

The official team has been optimizing this algorithm. Before testing the network online, core developer why revealed that on the testnet-staging branch, a more efficient algorithm has been implemented, and it is likely to be deployed on this test network. This will fundamentally reduce the dependence on the GPU. You must know that if the miner cannot complete the proof of time and space, it will be punished.

4. GPU becomes optional

Due to the increase in GPU support some time ago, a large number of mining machine manufacturers invested huge costs to adapt the algorithm's hardware requirements. At that time, basically not using a GPU would definitely time out and fail.

From the measured data feedback from Filcloud today, it can be seen that only using the CPU can also pass the time and space certification (45 seconds). This is a blockbuster! !!

The following figure shows the test data of two different types of CPU

I can feel the efforts and attempts of the official team. This project is really hard for my wife and wife. Let's see what they have done during this time:

1. Mix time-space proof with leader election (ePoSt) to further improve attack resistance and offset the risk of immature verifiable delay functions
2. Use zero-knowledge proof (zkSNARK) to ensure the confirmation of miner's work
3. Adopt an innovative expected consensus mechanism (EC) to achieve efficient elections and achieve effects close to SSLE
4. GHOST (the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree) is used to achieve the stability of the chain
5. Adopt the combination of POW + POS to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance while meeting economic requirements. Use Stacked Deep Robust Graph (SDRG) and Extended Graph (EG) technologies to solve the time delay requirements of storage proofs and the time security requirements of time and space proofs. To prevent storage spoofing (three attack methods)

Most of the algorithms and solutions here are the research results of recent years. Some of them appeared within two years. The implementation of So and Filecoin is the result of a large number of theoretical and practical breakthroughs, and it is a miracle and template.

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