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Kaspa's Shai Wyborski on Block Rate and Small Miners
One of Kaspa's original contributors argues that ten blocks a second lets small miners earn daily, and that slow blocks, not ASICs, push mining into pools.
Six or seven hundred dollars. That, Shai Wyborski told Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, was the investment a home miner needed to find about one Kaspa block a day, mining solo. Wyborski is one of the original contributors to Kaspa, and he opened by saying he spoke for no foundation and no mining company. The conference ran June 24 to 26, 2024. Bitcoin traded at $61,272 then. Today it is at $82,660.
His target was a piece of conventional wisdom: that ASIC mining is centralizing. In his words, people say that ASIC mining is centralized because you need a lot of hardware and you need to sink in a lot of money. Wyborski said the problem is not the chips. It is the block rate.
Bitcoin produces 144 blocks a day. That means, he said, at most 144 solo miners or pools can see daily income. Everyone else waits, or joins a pool. Kaspa runs the GHOSTDAG protocol, invented by Yonatan Sompolinsky, and on its test network it produced ten blocks a second. That is 864,000 blocks a day, so in his arithmetic up to 864,000 solo miners or pools can earn daily.
He pointed to the hardware market as evidence. Kaspa's smallest ASIC, the KS0, was still a best seller after bigger, more efficient machines arrived. On most networks, he said, small machines lose their buyers when a better model ships. Kaspa, he said, was the second-largest proof-of-work network by capital expenditure, with about half a billion dollars in mining hardware, and still a couple of hundred dollars was enough to take part.
He also took on the worry that ASIC makers end up holding most of the coin. Kaspa's emission, he said, was designed so that ASICs appeared at around the same share of circulating supply as on Bitcoin. On other coins, ASICs showed up when only a small share of the supply was out.
Running a node was his next point. People have run full Kaspa nodes at 3,000 transactions per second on Raspberry Pis. The hardware, he said, costs about 100 bucks, and the network can run at that rate for more than 1,000 years on less than 100 gigabytes of storage.
He closed on a protocol called DAGKNIGHT, which at the time existed only in theory. It would let the network speed up as connections improve, and slow down instead of losing security when they get worse. As he put it, we can't prove it yet, but we have a lot of reasons to believe that self-scaling is only possible for proof-of-work.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.