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Door 2

Intermediate · Knows crypto, not Kaspa

Intermediate. Kaspa is still proof of work. Parallel honest blocks are kept and ordered. Speed is not a new security story. Compare it to the chain you already know, then check what is actually live.

The one-sentence difference

Bitcoin selects a chain and orphans the rest. Kaspa represents concurrent proof-of-work in a DAG and orders it with GHOSTDAG. The double-spend check still happens after ordering. A DAG is not a free pass to spend twice.

If you already think in UTXOs, fees, and confirmation policy, you can skip Door 1. Stay here until you can place Kaspa without borrowing Ethereum’s words.

Against the rest of the map

Bitcoin. Same PoW cash lineage, UTXO ledger, no premine. Kaspa’s block interval is much shorter. That does not copy Bitcoin’s settlement culture. Recipients still pick a policy. Node bandwidth and validation cost rise with the extra blocks. If a Bitcoiner asks “is it final?”, the honest answer is: inclusion, acceptance, and the recipient’s wait are three different things. Same as Bitcoin, faster blocks.

Ethereum. Ethereum moved to proof of stake and an account virtual machine. Kaspa stayed with miners and UTXOs. Toccata added spending rules (covenants), covenant IDs, a ZK precompile, and sequencing lanes. That is not the EVM. You do not deploy a Solidity app onto Kaspa L1 today and get Ethereum’s tooling. “Smart contracts on Kaspa” is a sentence that needs a label: covenants are live protocol; application compilers are not all stable.

High-throughput PoS and L2s. Fast inclusion is often a sequencer or a validator set. Kaspa’s speed is many proof-of-work blocks. Honest work that arrives late is kept, not discarded. 100 BPS is a research target, not a spec. Crescendo’s 10 BPS is live. If you came from Solana, do not map TPS slogans onto block rate. Nodes still receive, validate, and store every block.

UTXO, not an account VM

Coins live as unspent outputs. A payment consumes outputs and creates new ones. Change is an output back to you. A covenant is a spending rule attached to an output: wait, limit, name the recipient, require a proof. That is closer to Bitcoin Script than to an EVM contract with storage.

Shared execution among many users (a lending pool, an AMM with one global book) is a different problem. Covenants do not by themselves give you that. vProgs are the research name for based programs with validity proofs. They are not a product testnet you can treat as live.

Live versus later

Use these labels. Mix them and you are pitching.

A merged Active KIP is law. A tweet, a Discord rumor, and a forum thread are not. Toccata is consensus. silverc is a compiler. People still mix those two in chat.

What speed does not buy

It does not remove miner concentration. It does not make every wallet support covenants. It does not make a repository into a product. It does not make a price chart into evidence. The skeptical list is the same as for any PoW coin, plus the extra node cost of a fast DAG.

Door 3 is the dated machine: KIPs, builder network, node. If you only wanted the map, open status and the playground next.

Kaspa intel · Parker’s model

A DAG is not a free pass to spend twice.

After GHOSTDAG orders the blocks, the ledger still spends an output only once. Compare that to the chain you already know, then check what is live versus research.

One output, two spending attemptsConstructed example
Available output10 KASBoth attempts refer to this same output.
Pay Alice10 KASAccepted
Pay Bob10 KASAlready spent
Alice’s payment consumes the output. Bob’s attempt cannot spend it again. Keeping both blocks does not make both payments valid.

The ordering is chosen here to expose the consequence. It is not a GHOSTDAG calculation. Fees are omitted from this conservation example.

Two miners. One network.
Two miners. Two independent blocks.

Miner 2 found C before hearing about B. Both blocks build on A.

Arrows reference earlier blocks.
A BLOCK earlier TRANSACTIONS Earlier block B BLOCK ref A TRANSACTIONS Miner 1 · 100 ms C BLOCK ref A TRANSACTIONS Miner 2 · 400 ms A BLOCK earlier TRANSACTIONS Earlier block B BLOCK ref A TRANSACTIONS Miner 1100 ms C BLOCK ref A TRANSACTIONS Miner 2400 ms
Inspect the timing
Adjust the delay and inspect a block

An illustrative two-miner model. Discoveries stay fixed at 100 and 400 ms. The same delay applies both ways. Packet positions show elapsed delivery, not physical distance.

Model assumptions and event times

Delivery occurs before discovery at an exact tie. Real mining is random. D is a possible later block, not a timed discovery. This example calculates neither GHOSTDAG nor confirmation confidence.

TimeEvent
0 msBoth miners know A.
100 msMiner 1 finds B, referencing A.
400 msMiner 2 finds C, referencing A.
600 msMiner 2 receives B.
900 msMiner 1 receives C.
Optional film · Kaspa Silver
Kaspa Silver: what Kaspa is.

Explore from here

Learn on the models. See the live DAG. Try a spend only if you brought test coins.

Kaspa Graph Inspector

The live blockDAG. This is the picture. The rest of the door is text.

Open kgi.kaspad.net
If the frame is blank, the inspector blocked embedding. If the picture stops, treat it as paused, not as a failed network. The link still works.

I am… these people land on this door.

Knows crypto, not KaspaInstitution (speculative)CyberpunkHigh-tech from another chain

Continue

The playground is the mechanics. These pages are the next lesson and the extra reading.

Try it

Same for every door.

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