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Comment by rsa25519 | Hacker News Reader

This is filecoin. Afaik it's storage-based, not compute-based.

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-v...

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?

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.

Assuming one is starting off by sealing pledged sectors, they would also need to re-seal any such sector upon upgrading to store actual content pursuant to some deal they have accepted.

I'm assuming there is probably not enough real storage demand yet, so large miners will end up pledging sectors a fair chunk of the time, in order to increase their power, at least while they have spare disk space remaining.

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