(1/2)Fair launch and why it matters
And why a fair launch doesn't matter if the network isn't absolutely sound.
A fair launch proof of work network in this day and age starts out with imense friction.
1.
There are no wallets, there are no market places, there are no usecases. It's just a good, a commodity produced in search for a buyer.
2. Gamenet
For the earliest miners who joined, all they knew was that they throw money at
#kaspa and had the chance to get somewhere between 1-1000 kas per block won.
The primodial soup market was the discord.
Some asked for
$kas, some put it out for sale, sometimes they matched, a miner had to be a salesmen first and then a producer.
3.
2 weeks in
Sudden death happened, the dag was shattered by the memory bug the network was paused and solomined during the fix and at the same time the era of gamenet ended.
The 500 kas per block era started. The solo mined kaspa was sent to the burn adress.
As the bug that could have killed the network resolved and gamenet ended, we got to a doge-like issuance, super inflationary.
The variance diminished but the inflation was the same.
At the same time you needed to throw different kinds of money at it if you wanted to compete in this war of hashrate.
First mining was CPU a month later there was GPU.
4.
~6 months in
Market places like TXBit, Exbitron and TradeOgre opened up for systemic real-time pricing which gave minees some light, but
little did the miners and traders know about the struggles of these early cexes.
Not your keys not your coins.
This was about the time when issuance changed again, this time for the chromatic geometric issuance which gave some hint about how scarce kaspa would become. Allt the worst chaos was now over,
Demand of coins grew faster than the mining network, miners could now calculate revenue and costs with ease, expand their GPU-mining.
Life was simple, started to look easy.
5.
then Ethereum went POS and vast amounts of industrial GPU miners sought profitability for their rigs, enter kaspa.
Hashrate spiked, profitability grew thin but demand of coins continued to grow.
Maybe we could still live happily ever after?
Knives, bow and arrow or a spears are meaningless in a gunpowder fight.
Looking back, the first asics were weak but at the time of their launch they 10x:ed the yield per watt of a GPU and yet again you were forced to change the form of money you have to spend to compete for the kas.
The early asic war:
Ks1, ks2, goldshell, dragonball, ks3, ks5l, ks5m, ks5.
They came and went obsolete as soon as the next arrived. Miners had to sell their asics shortly after they had bought them to buy a more efficient one. More and more coins got sold for hyper efficient asics that got overproduced and drowned the market in abundance.
Diminishing returns, between the ks1 and ks5 was 1 year, then it took a full year to produce antminer KS7 which was 100% more efficient.
Released when the bear was already here.
6.
Mining was never easy, numerous potential events could have killed the network before it started trading at billions. A scarcity wave will by nature create a wave of abundance, an action and an equal opposite reaction.
Here it does not matter how much efficient hashpower you hold at any time. If the demand of coins is net negative you will have to shut off if you mine for profit, you compete with the cheapest electricity and zealots who mine at a loss on faith and conviction.
7.
Kaspa did survive a fair launch, in this day and age with all the surrounding competition in this space.
Every single kas had an honest cost anchored to its creation, every second every block. Fair launch means something.
It means those who dump on you with profit worked extremely hard to do so. The game is fair, the unfair bit is information asymmetry.