¶ DAGLabs
¶ DAGLabs existence, actions and earnings history
- DAGLabs founded in 2018 by Yonatan Sompolinsky and backed by (mainly) Polychain and (lesser) Accomplice and Genesis Mining investments in the amount of 8M$ to implement GhostDAG protocol in the opensource code of the coin, and to develop (and later sell and lease) an optical ASIC mining devices for that coin;
- by the mid-2021 it was decided there's no sense to continue funding the development since optical ICs are not ready for a factory-grade implementation and in general the interest to PoW coins is ceased in the cryptosphere, so by the agreed decision of Polychain and DAGLabs the project is henceforth stated as "owned by the community" while DAGLabs and Polychain waive any intellectual property rights;
- by the start of the mainnet (2021 Nov 07) DAGLabs still exists but in the half-sleeping mode, supporting several developer on a part-time basis and waiting for the mainnet launch;
- after a launch DAGLabs starts mining on the common grounds, slowly spending the remnants of the initial funding (in the amount of several hundred thousand USD) to mine Kaspa on a rented Amazon HW;
- by late-December the GPU miner is written by the community member @hauntedcook (and then later also in cooperation with @demisrael), so DAGLabs switches to another type of rental HW;
- mining on rented facilities lasts for about 5 months, after which the finances are finally exhausted;
- these mined coins, in the amount of not more than 3% (probably close to 2.5%) of the max supply (i.e. obviously <850M Kas) are shared between investors (Polychain at al) and the former employees, advisers etc of the DAGLabs in some proportion;
- DAGLabs is officially closed after that (took some time to dissolve a legal entity; wasn't operational at all during that time).
Source links:
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/1046886450601398393
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/996761363894509568
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/909907923084382218/996054649410953226
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/909907923084382218/996047610651627551
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/909907923084382218/995774105712337026
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/991123684385361951
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/990897783475163136
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/990893756591001640
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/990739452622163989
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/990736859791523850
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/955793396268687380
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/610815395527393301/954060451145203813
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/610815395527393301/953621816205799445
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/939960107771518996
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/939913692722659358
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/909907923084382218/924705390309019720
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/916662870379491328/920271238088253450
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/909907923084382218/911015989792108574
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/599153231305637890/907943846699204621
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/599153231305637890/906770708586197002
https://discord.com/channels/599153230659846165/599153231305637890/895617582856548372
¶ What's the history with mining hardware bought by DAGLabs, according to @Hashdag's Meduim article?
Question: Hashdag wrote in Medium article that they bought 'mining equipment' for the PoW to have an early advantage. What it was, why there's no any additional info?
Answered by Ori Newman:
Where was no specific answer given because the mining algorithm has no name. We just tried to cooperate with a mining company and develop an algorithm that will be very easy for them to develop ASICs for. I can guarantee to you that it had no slight relation to the current used mining algorithm (k-heavyhash).
¶ How much Kaspa does DagLabs or Polychain capital have?
Less than 3% of the total supply (840,000,000 KAS). See here
¶ Why was the HeavyHash (oPoW) mining algorithm chosen? Was it so the devs could premine and control any hardware?
When Kaspa was designed (before the mainnet launched) the team thought that oPoW would be valuable in reducing waste and saw the potential in it and how it could potentially be more decentralized than the current ASIC mining. oPoW is also as secure as SHA256. The value proposition of energy-efficiency will materialize only when specific optical hardware became a thing, until then community members can still mine with CPUs/GPUs. To develop the hardware for this a external group (not connected to Kaspa) needed funding and funding required a live network to sustain it. Kaspa volunteered to be that network (made the first move). Later on the group developing hardware for oPoW dissolved and DAGlabs as a for profit entity also dissolved. As a result there was ultimately no premine or hardware specific to the developers or any insider group. Anyone could mine equally when the network launched (see above answers). Additionally the developers alone didn't just choose to use oPoW ,the community voted on it before the mainnet launched.
¶ Why Kaspa is a fair launch coin when its theoretical research was funded by Polychain? Why did they leave? Is Kaspa a scam?
Why Kaspa is a fair launch coin, screenshot 1
Why Kaspa is a fair launch coin, screenshot 2
Michael Sutton's POV on the fair launch situation
Ori Newman's POV on the fair launch situation
Ori Newman's answer about DAGLabs' mining hardware
Answered by Yonatan Sompolinsky:
DAGLabs raised overall roughly 8M$.
The project's initial business plan was to develop OPoW-like ASICs and sell and distribute their hashrate, as I described in some medium post. I thought of it as a good middle ground between decentralization and sustainability.
The fact that this plan failed is indeed a failure of DAGLabs as a for profit entity. The reason it failed was a combination of the immaturity of OPoW ASIC tech, and (my, together with Polychain's) assessment that pure fair launch is the only path to give Kaspa (and, in fact, any PoW coin) true chance at growing to meet its goals/dreams.
If you think Polychain's support of this is weird or even suspicious then you probably hadn't had the chance to engage with crypto VCs. As I said in Kaspa's Telegram group, crypto space has seen way more bizarre instances than a VC supporting fair launching over no launching.
See also screenshots.
Additionally, when the Kaspa mainnet went live in November 2021 there was already a decent size community. Anyone could have mined at that time.
¶ Transations history
¶ Where is the transaction history prior to March 2022?
- There are attempts to piece together people's data directories and add it to the explorer. It exists in bits and pieces; it's just not linked with the block explorers right now.
- Even in the unlikely chance that all the data is never found, it doesn't mean it's insecure. All UTXO data is guaranteed to be updated properly at any moment so all transactions that ever happened are still valid (as there are rules to check at any moment). Proof of Work accumulated work proofs are kept forever.
- There is a genesis and a proof-of-genesis that allows you to verify that the current UTXO set is legit. If you wanted to, you can use the UTXO set to view all the balances in all accounts.
Shai Wyborski and Michael Sutton have put together an elaborate step-by-step guide to locally cryptographically verify the chain integrity. Anyone who has concerns about the integrity of the chain (or is just looking for a fun way to spend an afternoon) is welcome to follow. That tutorial is available either in the form of a Jupyter notebook or a PDF. The steps therein allows anyone to cryptographically verify that:
- The current state of the Kaspa chain evolved from an empty UTXO set;
- The original genesis (from Nov' 7, 21) and the post-restart genesis (from Nov' 23, 21) were not created earlier than claimed (proved via including a commitment to the most recent Bitcoin block in both of them, which is a cryptographic version of posting a picture with today's newspaper).