On October 11, that crash completely emptied all $FIL in my Binance account. Suddenly, I felt that I should write something about my five-year journey in the crypto space, as a special farewell to this token that has been a part of my crypto career for quite a while.

I actually got into cryptocurrency quite early. The first time I had a deep impression of Bitcoin was probably in 2012. At that time, a friend spent a thousand dollars to buy Bitcoin, and sold it when it rose to twelve hundred. Since I work in IT, I would occasionally see news about Bitcoin.

Then in 2015, when I was doing operations and had quite a few idle server resources, the leader suggested trying mining. I remember we were mining $doge with all Dell R730s, mining for a day, and the coin price seemed to be around 0.0000... $ETH was probably around five dollars back then. After a few days of mining, I found it uninteresting and gave up.

In 2018, I joined a public cloud company as an architect. On the same floor, there was a blockchain company working on a hard drive mining project called Lava, which purchased public cloud resources from us to mine with large-capacity hard drives— quite similar to the Chia model in 2021. They didn't last long either, and looking back, that project might have just been ill-timed.

The real turning point was at the end of October 2020. On the company's internal document platform, someone shared a PPT introducing IPFS interstellar file storage, which I downloaded and studied carefully— that file should still be lying in my old computer. After reading it, I was truly shocked. At that time, a colleague from another BU had just sold a license for distributed storage software worth 20PiB. Looking back now, that might have just been a small cluster, but at the time, it was my first experience of the impact of 'distributed storage' in reality.

From 2019 to 2020, I mainly ran projects in universities and government, and encountered quite a few cases of distributed storage. At that time, the company acquired a company that did OpenStack, and their strongest asset was having the top Ceph team in Asia. There was an internal case for Migu, a 3PiB Ceph cluster that used about 30 devices, which was claimed to be the largest in the country at that time. I also created a distributed storage solution of 1PiB for the archives of a certain prefecture-level city, which in my understanding at the time was already a very large capacity, capable of storing a lot of things. Moreover, at that time, the external storage authorization cost 450 yuan for 1TiB. The authorization fee for that 20PiB cluster in Shanghai was close to ten million yuan a year.

With such shock and curiosity, I made up my mind to study IPFS and Filecoin carefully.#FIL/USDT