Run a disputer

Verifying submitted Window PoSts is expensive, and that cost can drastically increase when network congestion causes the gas base fee to rise. To address this, Filecoin Improvement Proposal FIP-0010 enables node operators to optimistically accept Window PoSts on-chain without verification, allowing them to be disputed later by off-chain-verifiers.

Window PoSt messages are necessary for ongoing maintenance of storage power. Verifying the submitted proofs is expensive, and when the gas base fee rises due to congestion, these messages become even more costly. For storage providers with mostly empty partitions, this cost can exceed their expected rewards from maintaining power. We need to ensure that these messages are cheap for miners, even when specifying a very high gas fee cap.

The Filecoin Improvement Proposal 0010 (FIP0010) allows storage providers to optimistically accept Window Proof of Spacetime proofs (Windows PoSt) on-chain without verification, allowing them to be disputed later by off-chain verifiers. Any Lotus node may dispute any on-chain storage proofs submitted in the past 1800 epochs (~15h) by invoking DisputeWindowedPoSt.

When a dispute successfully refutes an optimistically accepted Window PoSt, the storage provider is fined one invalid proof fee (IPF) per active sector in the partition at the moment when said storage provider submitted the proof, plus a flat fee of 20 FIL. All incorrectly proved sectors are marked faulty, and the address that submitted the dispute is awarded a fixed DisputeReward.

Penalties and rewards #

The penalty for submitting an invalid Window PoSt and the reward for submitting a valid dispute are both subject to change. At the time of writing, those values are:

Run the disputer #

You can run the disputer by using the chain disputer command within Lotus. The following examples were run on a local devnet.

1. Fully sync a Lotus node.

2. Call the chain disputer function with the following options, following by the start command:

   Name	Description
   --max-fee	The maximum amount of FIL that you are willing to spend for a DisputeWindowedPoSt message.
   --from	The address you want to send the messages from. If an address is not specified, Lotus will use the default address.

   lotus chain disputer --max-fee 1 --from t3r25povzrwpomqlwtxtt25ou76galexvgr3ucgvvtwxiwy2gtqltlzshmtdyz4ys7mt5phoouedengajltbka start
   
   > checking sync status
   > Worker: 101; Base: 0; Target: 0 (diff: 0)
   > State: <unknown: 0>; Current Epoch: 0; Todo: 0
   > Validated 4 messages (1 per second)
   

3. The disputer will continue to verify submitted WinPoSts. To end the disputer press CTRL + c:

   > Exit by user
   > setting up window post disputer
   > 2021-02-22T17:44:11.362-0500	ERROR	rpc	[email protected]/client.go:392	got rpc message with cancelled context: context canceled
   > ERROR: Notify stream was invalid
   

   You can safely ignore any stream errors when exiting the disputer.

Manual dispute #

You can manually send a specific dispute message using the dispute command. This feature has a very narrow use-case and is for advanced users only. To perform a manual dispute run lotus chain disputer dispute [minerAddress] [index] [postIndex], where:

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