Satoshi is working
on Kaspa now.

Satoshi is working on Kaspa now.

You need proof? Look at how few updates Bitcoin has shipped lately, and you see the covenants dilemma for yourself. Kaspa is taking over and becoming the global cryptographic machine.

I mean that as a reading of where the work is happening, rather than a claim about who anyone is. Satoshi created something special and walked away. What was left behind was a founding idea, and ideas move to wherever they can still grow.

Bitcoin chose to stand still

Bitcoin's last major upgrade, Taproot, activated in November 2021. Since then the most discussed proposals, the covenant opcodes such as OP_CTV and OP_CAT that would let a coin carry rules about how it may be spent next, have been debated for years without activating.

That caution is Bitcoin's strength as a store of value. A monetary base that nobody can change is exactly what digital gold should be. It also means that the programmable, high-throughput layer the rest of the economy needs will be built somewhere else. That is the covenants dilemma: every change that would make Bitcoin more useful is a change to the thing that makes it trustworthy.

Digital silver

Kaspa launched on 7 November 2021, three years ago yesterday, and a week before Taproot.^[1] It is a proof-of-work currency, like Bitcoin, built to solve the problems Bitcoin chose to leave alone: scalability and speed, while keeping strong security and decentralisation. It builds on Bitcoin's foundation and adds speed and scale, which makes it a kind of digital silver.

Four things set it apart:

1. It solves the trilemma. Security, decentralisation and scale, without trading one away for the others.
2. No corporate sponsor. There is no company behind it that owns the roadmap.
3. No initial coin offering. A fair launch and a fair distribution, with no premine.
4. A directed acyclic graph of blocks. A blockDAG in place of a single chain.

The fourth point is the one that matters most. In Bitcoin, two miners who find a block at the same moment compete, and one block is thrown away. Kaspa's GHOSTDAG protocol, from the research of Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar, keeps blocks created in parallel and orders all of them.^[2] Nothing is orphaned, so blocks can come fast. Today Kaspa produces one block per second, with ten per second on its roadmap, and covenants are on that roadmap too.

Energy, again

In Energy currency I wrote that the oldest requirements for money are that it is hard to earn, limited in supply and easy to verify, and that proof of work meets them with electricity and mathematics. Kaspa keeps that bargain. Every block is paid for in energy, and anyone can verify it in an instant. What changes is how much the machine can do with that energy.

Bitcoin is the gold. Kaspa is where the building goes on.

Sources

1. Kaspa. https://kaspa.org/
2. Y. Sompolinsky, S. Wyborski and A. Zohar, 'PHANTOM GHOSTDAG: A Scalable Generalization of Nakamoto Consensus'. https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/104