Kaspa is a PoW coin, and, like a Bitcoin, it's a fair launch coin, so there's no premine and no preallocation. Every single KAS is mined — just like every BTC is — in a highly competitive environment right from the mainnet launch.
Yep, here's the PDF. Notice the actual dates might swing a bit due to the network conditions: the start moment of every next phase is based on a predefined DAA score value, and the moment of achieving of one or another value of DAA score may deviate from its estimated date and time because of the total network hashrate fluctuations and thus the block generation pace fluctuations.
Currently the minimum TX fee is 1 sompi per gram, so for a typical transaction the fee is about 0.000023 Kas. Some wallets use a fixed "0.0001 Kas per UTXO" formula. Also, fees become higher when the network is congested: it's when the fee market kicks in. Moreover, due to KIP-9 effects, under certain condition the fee should be additionally raised even when the network is not congested, to satisfy the KIP-9 mass constraints.
No. Only a publicly declared fair launch.
Nah. Fair launch model, a Nakamoto's philosophy.
The monetary policy has two phases:
Note that the policy dictates how many coins are minted per second regardless of the block rate. Should the block rate change in the future, the reward will be adjusted accordingly to maintain the same emission rate.
Here are some numbers:
The last estimation is correct while the blockrate is kept as is, namely 1 BPS. Otherwise the time of zero reward will be shorter for log2(new BPS) years, say if 32 BPS is established, the new zero-reward date becomes 36 – log2(32) = 36 – 5 = 31 years from the mainnet start.
One might think that such a reduction in the schedule could affect the total emission, but this is not significant. Here's the calculation: in the very last year, the total reward paid will approximately be 86,400 seconds per day * 10 BPS * 365.25 days a year * 10-8 Kas per block = 3.15576 Kas. This amount is doubled in the year before the last: 6.3 Kas, and doubles again in the year prior to that, and so on. Therefore, in 5 years, this will total (25-1)*3.15 = 31 * 3.15 = 97.83 Kas. This is not a value that needs to be seriously considered or actively addressed, as the total emission variability will be much higher for other reasons down the line.
There's a dedicated X post explaining this by Shai "Deshe" Wyborski, one of the Kaspa theoretics.
Approximately 28.7 billion KAS which is a fixed supply with no plans to increase.
tl;dr: In a nut shell, the hard cap in the code is 29 billion but overall supply is an estimate, due to the halving schedule being on DAA scores, rounding, original “gamenet stage” random rewards, and possibility for emission to reduce with faster block rates.
Elaborated:
So to conclude, the total emission may change within some small limits, but it is guaranteed to never reach 29 billion, and the most accurate value that is available for evaluation is given by the bot in the discord: 28,704,026,601 KAS in the period of 36 years from the mainnet start (November 07, 2021).
contd: “Looks like it can not rely on transaction fee to incentive miner because it is too small?”
By 2029 Kaspa will have an even lower inflation rate than Bitcoin and have arguably become the world's most "hard money." Also by that time, on account of its revolutionary implementation of POW, Kaspa may well be the "most secure money" humanity has ever known. These facts plus Kaspa's anticipated future speed increases (up to 100 bps by that time, leaving Visa in the dust) plus smart contracts (likely by that time) plus Kaspa's support for Eth settlements (presently in the planning stage), plus L2s and their fee steams (widely anticipated), should make Kaspa exponentially more valuable within 5 years. Therefore, the volume of fees and new fee streams are anticipated to be sufficient to support profitable mining. In fact, Kaspa's fee flow may well be sufficiently robust to generate far more wealth for miners than the emission schedule does today. Supposing that mining isn't sufficiently profitable in spite of all these anticipated developments, network fees could be increased. In the unlikely event fee increases aren't sufficient to sustain mining profitability, various other options are available to support mining. The important thing to realize is that the reduced emission schedule will vastly increase the scarcity of newly-mined Kaspa within this decade, thereby helping reduce amount for sale on the market, thereby minimizing the likelihood that special measures to support mining will ever be needed.
Technically, there are also other alternatives, such as increasing the standard fee amount, adding a tail emission or demurrage (a fee for stationary UTXOs), and each of them has its pros and cons, but essentially all of them require intervention in the emission schedule and are not discussed for actual implementation, but rather considered by some of the community members as an alternative possibilities from general considerations.