Filecoin faced a collective strike by miners, who criticized the system’s pre-mine collateral requir

Recently, there has been a major incident in the cryptocurrency mining industry—five of the top mining companies, including Zhihe Cloud, decided to go on strike simultaneously, shutting down their operations. For example, Zhihe Cloud’s number of mining machines dropped from over 8,000 to just 276 units. The other four companies also ceased all mining activities;时空云的 machines fell from over 11,000 to just 1,870 units last night. According to internal sources, many other mining companies have also decided to temporarily stop increasing their computing power. So far, the official authorities have not given any clear responses to this situation, leaving the entire industry waiting to see what will happen next.

The shutdown of mining operations is a last resort, not a form of protest.

Lai Chuhang, the founder of the IPFS Chinese community and chairman of SpaceTime Cloud Technology, said in his WeChat Moments: “When the main network goes live, all miners should stop working. This isn’t some so-called ‘protest’ at all. It’s a last resort. Everyone has no coins to use as collateral for mining. Idiot PL, idiot economic model!”

A miner named “Song Jiang” on Slack also expressed his dissatisfaction with Filecoin’s actions, saying, “I have a suggestion for all miners: stop creating new sectors and sell off all your coins now when they’re at high prices. The coins held by early investors haven’t been released yet. This is the best opportunity we have.”

He also said that if the authorities cancel the requirement for pre-mortgage within one month, then they should continue to create new sectors. Otherwise, they will switch to using a forked coin for mining. He suggested that the authorities do two things: inform everyone that their accounts are controlled by Protocol Labs, and cancel the pre-mortgage requirement. The price of FIL tokens dropped below $44, with a daily decline of over 16%.

Founder Juan Benet: All is well with the network’s computing power.

Juan Benet, the founder of Filecoin, posted a tweet in the early hours of today (20th) to clarify these rumors. He stated that Filecoin’s computing power is growing slowly, currently reaching 600p PiB (pebibytes). Everything is proceeding according to plan.

“There have been persistent reports of ‘miner strikes’, but I must say that these are completely unfounded.”

Monitoring data shows that storage capacity is normal, and there are no abnormalities in computing power usage. It seems that miners are complying with Filecoin’s protocols, and they have indeed earned quite a bit from mining rewards.

Additionally, Juan Benet also shared information about miner rewards.

“Let’s take a look at the profits of top miners over the past 24 hours:

Top miners earned 11,000 FILs. With a value of 1 FIL equals $32, this means they earned $352,000 per day.

The top 50 miners earned a total of 118,000 FILs. At $32 per FIL, this amounts to $3.7 million per day.”

Meanwhile, Filecoin has also announced a loan program for FILs. It was mentioned that Protocol Labs currently has no plans to sell FILs. The FILs retained by the team have clear uses, but they will still provide loans to miners to support Filecoin’s ecosystem.

Additionally, next week, through the FIP004 protocol, 25% of tokens will be released in advance. This agreement is relatively favorable for miners. After implementation, it should allow miners to operate at around 80% of their maximum capacity.

Juan Benet 更於推特写道，现在的网路增长速度慢，是因为 Filecoin 网路已经不在补贴抵押费用，这一切是在计划之內的。

「事实上，在过去两週，我们的开发人员建议矿工放慢算力增长，以適应现在的代幣流通量，或是暂停扩张直到他们负担得起(代幣抵押量)。而一些矿工也听从我们的建议，停止扩张。」

矿工陷入Filecoin的死亡螺旋之中

Filecoin上线引发的种种争议逐渐台面化，矿工群体的与Filecoin官方的博弈更加激烈，双方博弈的核心在于经济模型中区块奖励的释放规则以及前置扇区抵押。

所谓的前置扇区抵押是指，Filecoin矿工参与挖矿，需要先准备一定量的FIL用于扇区抵押，当前是0.17Fil/扇区(32GB存储空间)，这意味着，矿工在投入巨额资金购买硬件后，还需要获取一定量的FIL作为抵押币，才能增长算力，才有机会获得出块奖励。

假如矿工咬咬牙投入资金去二级市场收Fil作为抵押币，参与挖矿，在积累到一定算力以后(10T)，艰难的挖出一个区块，获得10个左右的Fil，这10个Fil还需要按照180天线性释放，也就是说，从出块开始，每天只能获得出块奖励的1/180。

This means that the rewards from newly generated blocks are still not sufficient to cover the collateral requirements for sectors. To increase their chances of generating blocks, miners need to continue purchasing Fil for collateral purposes. This creates a vicious cycle, where miners are trapped by the collateral requirements imposed by the system.

However, it’s important to note that if miners choose not to collateralize their assets, then Fil becomes useless in the secondary market, as buying it becomes meaningless. But currently, miners have many mining machines, but they don’t have enough FIL to use them for mining. After all, miners who have prepared for years have machines but no FIL to use them. Of course, miners can buy FIL in the secondary market to mine, but this would mean a huge deficit in their income.

This cycle continues indefinitely: the value of Fil needs someone to maintain it, but miners want to mine it too, leading to a situation similar to a “death spiral”. So, it’s better to collateralize assets, but miners don’t want to do so.

But if miners decide to stop investing now, they will lose their initial investments, along with any potential profits. They also face the pressure from customers who want to buy mining machines or computing power. Miners are trapped in a death spiral caused by Filecoin, which is why they choose to go on a collective “strike”.