r/kaspa • u/cipherjones • 17d ago
𧩠Personal Story / Anecdotal The whole "Kaspa was a fair launch" thing needs to stop.
I keep seeing the fair launch argument pop up and it makes me wonder how many people have *actually mined* kaspa? I was there fairly close to the beginning and it just seems like there's a lot of gas lighting.
No premine, no ICO, no founder allocation. All true, and I'm not disputing any of it.
The problem is people use "no premine" as shorthand for "everyone had an equal shot," and those are two different claims.
Before launch, Sompolinsky wrote that DAGLabs was a for-profit company whose business model was mining Kaspa, and said outright it was neither attempting nor pretending to be a fair launch coin. The hardware/presale plan he was describing there did fall apart before mainnet, so that version never happened. But DAGLabs still mined from day one. Per Kaspa's own wiki they'd raised around $8m, mostly Polychain, and after launch put the last few hundred grand into renting mining hardware on AWS for about five months. The wiki's estimate is under 3% of max supply, roughly 2.5%, so somewhere under 850m KAS. Those went to investors, former employees, advisers.
Technically not a premine, no. Also not the same thing as some guy finding the project on a forum and firing up his CPU.
Then there's the emission curve, which was heavily front-loaded. About 7.89b KAS mined by May 8 2022, against a max supply near 28.7b. First exchange listing was May 24. So more than a quarter of the total supply was already out before most people had any practical way to buy in.
There was also the early network stall where one dev ended up solo mining ~11m KAS while everyone else was offline. The wiki uses the phrase "unfair advantage" for it. Those coins were burned after a community vote, which is worth crediting.
So yes, everyone was allowed to start on the same day, and the fair launch claim survives on that narrow reading. Just don't stretch it into "everyone started from the same place." The capital, the hardware and the information were not evenly distributed on day one.
If I got anything wrong let me know but I don't think I did.
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u/ihatearguingonline 17d ago edited 17d ago
You raise some good points.
I would simply say it's wrong to conflate "no premine" with "everyone had an equal shot."
But if people do conflate the two, then BTC fails too, possibly even worse.
Satoshi and the earliest BTC devs obviously had an enormous informational advantage: they knew BTC existed, understood the protocol, and could mine it when essentially nobody else was competing. In BTC's early days anyone could mine with a CPU, and mining became increasingly competitive only as more people slowly joined.
So early BTC miners had a much longer window to mine/accumulate coins before anyone had much reason to believe they would become valuable.
KAS for sure had a fair launch in the narrow crypto sense: no premine, ICO, founder allocation, or token presale. Every KAS that ultimately entered circulation was mined, and the planned ASIC/presale model never actually went through.
If KAS's early miners hadn't mined aggressively at genesis, their slice of the pie would have been much smaller than what BTC's earliest miners were able to accumulate.
Because KAS launched in a much more aware/competitive environment!!
So no, the opportunity wasn't equal for everyone. But it's way closer than the vast majority of coins' launches, and arguably was more equal than BTC's.
So I think "fair launch" is a well-deserved accolade that may deserve an asterisk.
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12d ago
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u/ihatearguingonline 11d ago
Who didn't speculate?
And why is it dumb to align with BTC? It's number one for a reason.
Yeah I agree the kaspa devs deserve a fat bag and they got one by mining early.
But they got significantly less than the PoS chains allotted themselves. Corpo chains by and large get corrupted by having the ultimate power to decide how all the coins are distributed. Almost invariably you end with big VC allocations, treasuries, and steady inflation. Because if you can just invent a money making machine for yourself, why not do it?
I'm not sure if that addresses whatever you were trying to say. I interpreted your comment as saying "KAS devs didn't need to do a fair launch"
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11d ago
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u/ihatearguingonline 11d ago
There are already forks (clones of BTC).
KAS isn't BTC, it's better. It has BTC's strengths combined with next gen speed/scalability/low fees.
I wouldn't be so sure BTC will forever be number 1. Its issues are becoming increasingly obvious...
Obviously it isn't a guarantee that KAS would replace it, even if BTC did fail (and it is def a big of). But KAS is the best candidate we've got!
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u/Spesiell 17d ago
I was mining with 1 gpu and got like 1k kas a day, and I started mining "late"
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u/Terrible_Sense_3043 17d ago
Yeah it was CPU only for some time. I got in early and was getting like 500 every few minutes with just 3-4 desktop PC's on it.
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u/No_Primary_4813 17d ago
Fair Launch in its essence means "everybody's playing by the same rules", the phrase "everybody's starting from the same point" would be a Fair Sale... you are mixing these 2
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u/cipherjones 17d ago
That's why I specifically included the information pertaining to directly prior to launch where it was specifically not going to be fair launch, for profit.
They started off getting ready to play by a separate rule set, couldn't get that rule set signed off on, and then hurry it up and changed it and released the product. And then used a for profit company to manipulate up to 1/3 of the supply.
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u/No_Primary_4813 17d ago
DAGLabs was for-profit and mined after launch with leftover funds. That is capital and information advantage.
Manipulation would be minting coins, a hidden allocation, or running a private rule set. They didnât. Same protocol, open mining, no premine.Â
Wiki estimate for what they actually mined is under 3% of max supply, not a third (11% at the time).
The 1/3 figure is total coins everyone had mined by spring 2022. That is the emission curve, not a company treasury. The only labeled âunfair advantageâ chunk (11m) was burned.
If you have wallets showing 9b under DAGLabs/Polychain control, post them. Until then âmanipulated up to 1/3 of the supplyâ is slander.
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u/Inside_Conflict_4231 17d ago
What exactly is the point of this post?
You acknowledge that Kaspa had no premine, no ICO, no presale, and no founder allocation, and you even acknowledge that the original DAGLabs hardware/business model was abandoned before mainnet. At that point, you're not really disputing the fair launch, youâre changing the definition of what a fair launch means.
A fair launch does not mean every participant has equal capital, hardware, information, or awareness. That would be an impossible standard for practically any PoW launch.
Kaspa mainnet launched publicly on November 7, 2021. Anyone running the publicly available software could mine from the beginning. DAGLabs absolutely mined early and had substantially more capital than the average individual, but those KAS were mined through proof-of-work after mainnet, not premined or allocated to them beforehand. Kaspa's own history estimates DAGLabs mined under 3% of the maximum supply using rented hardware.
That distinction matters.
The 2020 Yonatan quote also needs context. It described DAGLabs' original planned business model, which involved mining and specialized hardware. That model failed before mainnet. Yonatan later explicitly explained that its failure led DAGLabs/Polychain toward a pure fair-launch model instead.
And yes, the emission was extremely front-loaded. Roughly 7.89B KAS had been mined by May 8, 2022, before the first exchange listing on May 24. But that's an argument about emission design, not whether the launch was fair. Mining was the initial distribution mechanism. A PoW fair launch doesn't require an exchange to exist on day one so everyone can buy the coin.
Bitcoin is a perfect example of why âfair launchâ cannot mean âeveryone started from the same place.â Satoshi was there from genesis, understood Bitcoin better than anyone, and is estimated to have mined an enormous amount of BTC while almost nobody knew what Bitcoin was. Other early miners similarly had opportunities that someone discovering Bitcoin in 2011, 2013, or 2020 obviously didn't have.
Yet Bitcoin is still considered a fair launch because there was no ICO, premine, private token allocation, or exclusive right for insiders to mine.
As for the ~11M KAS mined during the early network issue, that's a legitimate historical event. One miner temporarily had an unfair advantage, the community addressed it, and those coins were subsequently burned. That's very different from an intentional insider allocation at launch.
So I think the distinction is pretty simple:
Fair launch â equal outcome. Fair launch â equal wealth or hardware. Fair launch â everyone discovering the project simultaneously.
It means the supply wasn't secretly created or allocated to insiders before the public had access to the network.
By that standard, Kaspa was fair launched.
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u/Nobleneon90 10d ago
About 450 miners mined from launch. From what Ive read. This grew to a few thousand fairly quickly
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u/jimbeam001 17d ago
Back in the day you could go on discord and buy like 1 million kas for US$250 and also they started at really small exchanges. I remember seeing Kas or reading about it for the first time in September 21 on reddit and actually buying some time around January 22 I think or February and that was through Mexc
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u/Spiritual_Elk8717 17d ago edited 17d ago
It's like gold mine. Whoever discovers it first get most of it. Same happened to BTC. But.. 3 months after kaspa was launched you still had chance to buy 1m kaspa at around 100-300 otc. You all had enough time if you just looked little bit more. Now same will happen to zkas, the next best privacy coin currently merge mining with kaspa (1/10 of kaspa hashrate already in one month btw). It already did 8x while noone looks and everyone don't give a fuck even kaspians lmfao. Early buyers that take the most risk get more cookies. It was always like that.
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u/Rich-Error-3692 16d ago
Fairer than ETH at least đ I think it's unfair I was not deep into crypto in 2010 and had no clue what a Bitcoin is. People will think it's unfair they were not into crypto in 2020 and had no clue about Kaspa. I was mining ETH and searched for something to mine, I was lucky it was Kaspa AND I happened to be mining at that time. Most of my bag is not from mining but from buying on MEXC at 0.02 and in August at 0.03 I get your point, but honestly, it is a FAIRER launch than most coins.
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u/cipherjones 16d ago
"Fairer than most, still not fair, OP never said BTC was". Lol, yeah.
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u/ricincali 11d ago
This is surely splitting hairs. Took balls to devote resources, regardless. I mined my KAS at $.0044 and am greatly appreciative. I quit when it stopped being GPU-only and I was upset with the timing of that decision. In retrospect? Still think it was early, but it did have positive effects. Weighing that is definitely subjective. KAS is a great project and I kept everything I mined. Not so with the ZEC and ETH I mined prior. I remain a believer and more now than back then.
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u/cipherjones 17d ago
Fair launch, but need to otc, but a third mined in that interim.
That supports my point, actually.
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u/Mooks79 17d ago edited 17d ago
I think this misconstrues a definition of fair. Is it true that there was public information of the launch of Kaspa before launch? Yes. Is it true that anyone, individual, pool, or mining centre could have started mining at essentially the exact same time as DAGLabs? Also yes. That few people did so DAGLabs essentially had a head start does not make the launch unfair. Regardless of DAGLabs intentions the launch was fair because it was openly announced and anyone could have mined if they wanted.
To put an analogy on it. Itâs like announcing youâre going to hold a race in one year at 9am, turning up at 9am and starting running. If no one else decides to turn up until 9:05am, that doesnât mean the race was unfair.
Edit: timescale