Filecoin calls miner-strike claims nonsense

The CEO of Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, called the reports of a miner strike nonsense a day after launch of the Filecoin mainnet.

According to him, miners are following the protocol and “making a ton of money.”

(7.0) I was asked about a supposed “Miner Strike” — This is nonsense. There is no strike. Miners are proving their storage just fine. There’s been no power loss out of the ordinary in the network. Miners are following the protocol, and making a TON of money doing so. pic.twitter.com/3U9MN0JGm9

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

Benet attributed the slowdown in the network’s growth to miners funding the collateral in FIL tokens. Earlier the project had advised them to slow down or pause to match the token flow, the head of Protocol Labs noted.

(7.4.) Fact: in last 2 weeks, *we* the devs recommended to many miners to slow down growth rate to match their token flow, or pause until they can afford to grow steadily.

Some of miners’ growth decrease is from following our advice.

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

Benet said that the Filecoin team is working on lowering the entry cost for new miners.

(7.9.) Fact: Adding capacity to the network is very hard right now. This is unfortunate, and painful. The community is working on R&D to make it easier and cheaper. But we had to start somewhere — so here we are.

— Juan Benet (@juanbenet) October 19, 2020

As of October 17, five of the largest Filecoin miners paused operations, while the others chose not to increase storage capacity.

The reason was the project’s economic model, which requires posting FIL as collateral. Miners lack the funds for this, and buying tokens on the secondary market is considered risky by some.

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