The Cloud Computing Dilemma

The cloud computing power dilemma

In recent years, with the booming blockchain industry, miners have enjoyed huge industry dividends, and more and more people are attracted by PoW mining and wish to become part of it. However, the development, production and maintenance of mining equipment requires a high level of expertise, making it difficult for most people to get directly involved in the industry. As a result, cloud computing has become the easiest way for most people to get involved in mining. For cloud mining products, the seller is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the mining equipment and the buyer pays for the electricity and other costs incurred in the mining process. Buyers are therefore freed from the tedious task of maintaining the underlying mining hardware, while receiving the profits generated by the computing power they purchase.

Most traditional cloud computing arithmetic operates in a centralised model, meaning that the value of the arithmetic is owned by a retail platform or independent third party: next to this some miners are trying to issue centralised arithmetic equity tokens to provide cloud computing services in a new way. While these two forms of cloud computing arithmetic are different, in essence they both require a centralised platform or credit backing from miners to ensure the delivery of arithmetic.

In terms of the underlying mining hardware, the centralised cloud hashing platform described above may be subject to overselling and fraud risks. When cryptocurrency prices fluctuate, buyers are likely to have difficulty redeeming their purchased hashing power, leading to systemic risk. In addition centralised cloud arithmetic products have no corresponding physical object to confirm ownership, posing a potential legal risk.

By its very nature, a miner is a device with great arithmetic power, so the industry is also exploring more sophisticated mining architectures to achieve efficient use of miner bandwidth, storage and arithmetic power. For example, Filecoin's first Proof-of-Spacetimethus innovation, which enables proof of on-chain measurement and off-chain resource storage, has attracted many miners with high-end mining machines who contribute significant amounts of compute, storage and bandwidth to maintain the FilecoinNetwork. To a large extent, this represents the future of blockchain development: increasingly complex off-chain resources will be measured and coordinated on-chain through various advanced cryptographic techniques as part of the Web 3.0 infrastructure. This new mining model also brings new challenges to existing cloud-based arithmetic products: traditional cloud-based arithmetic products are too simple to cope with the multiple dimensions of user needs such as sealing capacity in the cloud and efficient storage of Filecoin in the cloud, thus limiting the growth of the emerging cloud-based arithmetic market.