Jack

Self-hosted sovereign deterministic governed AI-OS with decentralized ledger-anchored settlement and deterministically enforced execution.

[Jack @JackKHash]

@BankQuote Great article. With the new ZK pipeline + PoW randomness, does Kaspa now have all the primitives needed for shielded/private transactions, or are key components still missing?

[Jack @JackKHash]

Isn’t it true that in GHOSTDAG the block rate is entirely decoupled from safety, which means higher BPS can safely increase decentralization — something that isn’t true in Nakamoto? And in PoS, increasing BPS leads to more centralization. But none of this is new. Why is he now pushing for 100 BPS? Doesn’t that imply they found a way to optimize the code so that even 100 BPS can run on cheap nodes? There must be more to it. For vProgs, isn’t BPS essentially the “clock frequency” of the decentralized computer formed by all vProgs?

[Jack @JackKHash]

What’s the point of paying with crypto if the total cost ends up higher than paying with fiat?

Here’s what you usually pay with Lightning (directly or indirectly):

Routing fees: 0.2%–0.5%
LSP fees: 0.3%–1%
Rate spread: 0.5%–1.5%
Merchant provider fee: 0.5%–2%
Fiat conversion: 0.5%–1.5%

Total practical cost to the user: roughly 2–6%.

Settlement on Lightning is not final — payments can be reverted, and the risk sits with the merchant

Lightning ends up looking like a more complicated, more expensive version of the card system it was meant to replace. And calling it “almost zero fees” while charging 2–6% is completely misleading — especially when true 0% payments are already possible, just not with Lightning.

Now compare that to using Kaspa:

Routing fees: 0% — not needed
LSP fees: 0% — no channels, direct on-chain settlement
Rate spread: 0% — DEXs guarantee the best available price
Merchant provider fee: 0% — merchants can receive directly on-chain
Fiat conversion: ~0.2% — only the DEX swap
Channel-opening fee: 0% — Kaspa does not require channels at all

On Kaspa, settlement is instant on L1, confirmed within seconds, and reaches the same security Bitcoin has after about an hour.

Kaspa Point of Sale doesn’t need any setup at all — it works instantly. No providers, no KYC, pure sovereignty, completely plug-and-play in seconds.

This was once Satoshi’s vision: true Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Not the current reality of Lightning, where it’s actually peer → provider → peer, with 2–6% in extra fees, added intermediaries, risk of failed payments, and only the hope — not the certainty — that it will eventually settle on Bitcoin.

[Jack @JackKHash]

Lightning is only trustless if you run your own node — which is risky unless you’re a pro, and completely unscalable because it would take 100 years for all humans to open channels.
It only scales when you trust LSPs to manage channels for you.
So Lightning is not trustless or permissionless in practice, because without providers most people can’t use it at all.

[Jack @JackKHash]

You’re wrong — they won’t have the power to block it.
We start with small, local community voting and crypto-project voting.
When people see how reliable it is — no failures, no manipulation, no distrust — the system proves itself.
Then we simply elect leaders who agree to implement it.
It’s not one big jump; it’s many small steps before the final one.
Saying “they won’t allow it” is surrendering your power — and that’s exactly what they want you to believe, that you don’t have real power.
With Kaspa and zk tech, we finally have the tools to unite our strength, restore trust in voting, and change everything.

[Jack @JackKHash]

In GD, red blocks can be seen as “late arrivers”: they are valid but arrive too far outside the main flow, comparable to distant stars in the sky that are visible yet not part of the constellation everyone agrees on. The “candle star” analogy fits the selected parent chain: these are the special, universally visible points the protocol tries to lock onto.

However, in GD the selected parent chain is still structurally vulnerable to reorgs. Because GD is a greedy algorithm, it may pick a chain that is not globally optimal—so an adversary with sufficient luck can force a reorganization even without violating assumptions. That structural greediness means the chosen chain is not maximally stable.

DK changes this. It is not greedy. Instead of picking the first valid chain that fits local rules, DK evaluates all feasible options and chooses the minimax-optimal chain—the one that minimizes the maximum possible disagreement among all honest observers. This property is structural, not statistical. Any honest observer with the same view of the DAG will converge to the same best choice.

As a result, the blocks in the DK-selected chain become the closest thing to “candle stars”: the blocks that all observers will independently agree on after one global round of communication.

DK is still probabilistic—as all permissionless PoW systems are—but the only remaining source of reorg probability is pure luck (Poisson variance), not structural weaknesses in the algorithm. That separation is unique to DK: it removes structural reorg opportunities and leaves only unavoidable probabilistic noise.

[Jack @JackKHash]

Great to hear. So the limitations of the EVM with respect to vProgs — do you have ideas on how to solve them? Would you need to develop an EVM template for vProgs, since the core team is not doing that and is only focusing on ACL-based VM templates? And do you see Igra as the solution that will make it easy to migrate EVM projects, while the future still needs to be ACL-based VMs, right?

[Jack @JackKHash]

As of my humble understanding: Rollup state roots become part of L1 state, in contrast to vProg state commitments which never become part of L1 state; they exist only as utxo anchors and disappear once the next commitment replaces them. In both cases many internal off-chain operations can be rolled into one state root or one state commitment, but the “up” — updating L1 — is only true for rollups. vProgs never update L1’s state root; they only post their state commitment and its ZK proof to L1.

[Jack @JackKHash]

It’s not a computer for heavy complex execution — but for trustless coordination, logic, state, permissions, and real-time decision flow for systems like games, AI agents, and industrial machines. Compared to existing blockchains with programs and smart contracts, vProgs can enable new, more complex applications that other chains can’t, because they’re sovereign, massively parallel, and globally composable. This makes real-time gaming, AI agent coordination, industrial machine control, and other advanced logic possible.

[Jack @JackKHash]

So every non-ACL-based VM can be easily wrapped — that’s really insane. I assume that in the future Kaspa’s native VMs will dominate, since they will probably be superior to any existing VM.

Can we call Kaspa with vProgs computationally the first fully distributed, sovereign, trustless, permissionless computer?

Because execution, state, sovereignty, scheduling, validation, and final ordering are all independently distributed and globally, trustlessly, permissionlessly composed through the DAG.

[Jack @JackKHash]

This was a great space to listen to — very insightful. @hus_qy You’re a great explainer, keep doing these kinds of tech spaces, you’re a natural. Your proposal to host a weekly space with core devs is great. We’re really missing this, and it would help educate our community. Even one hour a week would be enough.

[Jack @JackKHash]

Implementation, miner decentralization, and reward distribution are topics you could debate endlessly — and you’d find solid arguments on both sides. But what’s the point of arguing if there’s nothing better?

If you can find better concepts for these three areas, please share them. Kaspa was launched as fairly as possible; replicating that is already nearly impossible. And if you think it could be done better, I’d love to hear how.

In the long term, miner incentives will come from fees, which we’ll start to see once vProgs are implemented. Just show me one project with a better future outlook — I can’t see it, and I’m open to looking at everything.

Kaspa is already incredible technology. After DAGKnight, it mathematically reaches the limit of what a consensus protocol can achieve — you simply can’t do better. And with vProgs, it solves the challenge of distributed computing without sacrificing sovereignty. This represents the computational endgame of distributed systems.

So as for who mines Kaspa — I don’t really care. After seeing what KII is building and understanding how vProgs handle fees, there’s nothing left to worry about.

[Jack @JackKHash]

I’m not sure what your argument is or what you’re comparing it to, so I’ll answer in general. A 50% fault-tolerant distributed consensus system whose security does not weaken with higher block rates is phenomenal. We should be thankful for such groundbreaking mathematics as presented in GHOSTDAG and later in DAGKnight.

Of course, implementations can have mistakes — but Kaspa has some of the best engineers in the space. The last Crescendo update had zero fixes after mainnet release — an insane engineering achievement.

As for centralization, just look at Bitcoin to see how great ideas and technologies can be hijacked or corrupted. But if you look deeper, you’ll see that the future of mining won’t be limited to a few datacenters. Everywhere on Earth where energy is nearly free, mining hubs will emerge.

As KII explains, the energy sector has been waiting for a technology like Kaspa for 14 years. If that’s still not decentralized enough for you, show me anything with a better long-term outlook in terms of decentralization.

[Jack @JackKHash]

If we talk about the Bitcoin/Nakamoto protocol, then it’s clear that GHOSTDAG is mathematically proven to be a generalization of the Bitcoin/Nakamoto protocol. It’s obvious that Bitcoin represents the most inefficient case of GHOSTDAG — when k = 0.

Maybe some don’t understand what a mathematical generalization really means. An analogy would be:
Bitcoin’s protocol is like (a+b)^2 , while GHOSTDAG is like (a+b)^n . Of course, for n=2 you get the simple Bitcoin case. But failing to recognize the greatness and superiority of such generalization is, mathematically speaking, not a sound argument.

In addition to its superiority, the Nakamoto protocol’s security weakens as you increase the block rate, while GHOSTDAG’s security is not dependent on or bounded by block rate. It’s mathematically proven — so what exactly do you want to parameterize or engineer? Do you want to break mathematics by engineering?

I understand that the mathematics behind GHOSTDAG is more difficult to grasp than Bitcoin’s white paper, but that’s a weak argument. If humanity had always avoided progress or math because something was “too complex,” we’d still be riding horse carriages instead of flying airplanes or driving cars. You can tune parameters and engineer improvements, but you can’t turn a horse into a car or an airplane.

[Jack @JackKHash]

Kaspa is by definition more than Bitcoin — it fully includes Bitcoin’s technology while generalizing and extending it. You can debate whether that generalization is better, but you can’t deny that Bitcoin’s technology is fully contained within Kaspa, achieving higher block frequency through generalization without any trade-offs in decentralization or security.

[Jack @JackKHash]

@hashdag @vladcostea @DaWhiteRhino @zashi_app Kaspa with vProgs forms a distributed system of sovereign but composable logic zones, which together form a distributed computer. The frequency of this computer’s CPU is the block rate.

[Jack @JackKHash]

@NikolaGalilei @DesheShai @KodinglsFun @Kaspakira Couldn’t agree more. I’m tired of all the nonsense — it’s easier for people to talk about rumors than to invest the time to actually understand Kaspa’s technology and discuss what really matters.