Kaspa: Where do I begin?
One of the most common questions I see floating around Kaspa is “where do I begin?”. I assume that because you’re reading this article from someone who writes code for Kaspa that you are particularly interested in the technical aspects of the project. With that in mind, I’ve gathered a few light reading articles and starting points to get you started into understanding some of the underlying concepts of Kaspa. I also included a few references that you might find useful right after.
Simple articles to start your technical journey into Kaspa
- Kaspa 101 — https://michaelsutton.github.io/2022-04-23-kaspa-101-part1/ — this is a good primer for understanding how GhostDAG works
- How Increasing the Throughput Harm’s Bitcoin’s Security — https://someone235.medium.com/how-increasing-the-throughput-harms-bitcoins-security-76ed62313227 — this provides a good explanation on why you need to do scaling properly
- Scaling Bitcoin with BlockDAG — https://someone235.medium.com/scaling-bitcoin-with-blockdag-d785174a3402
- Kaspa — What are we actually doing here — https://medium.com/@shai.wyborski/kaspa-what-are-we-actually-doing-here-fd7b2e420ad1
- In which mayday mayday are we syncing about* — https://hashdag.medium.com/in-which-mayday-mayday-we-are-syncing-about-bf05ad58957a — this is a good primer for Kaspa’s pruning
- Kaspa GhostDAG 101(video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhI2zo44dfc — an overall good coverage of technical concepts
Diving Deeper
Now that you’ve got those initial primers out of the way, you might be interested in reading into these to dive deeper into the technical details
- Phantom GhostDAG— https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/104.pdf
- Prunality — https://github.com/kaspanet/docs/blob/main/Reference/prunality/Prunality.pdf
- The DAG Knight Protocol — https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1494.pdf
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Getting into the Code
Maybe you’re bored and done with the technical concepts or just simply want to dive into the code. Here are some of the repositories you should check out:
- https://github.com/kaspanet/rusty-kaspa — this is the main Kaspa node repository. If you want to keep up with the latest advancements, this is definitely the code to look at.
- https://deepwiki.com/kaspanet/rusty-kaspa — Deep Wiki documentation of the above repo. AI-generated but quite accurate. I suggest reading this, then clarifying with any of the devs to verify anything that may seem off.
- https://github.com/kaspanet/kips — this is the repository containing Kaspa Improvement Proposals (aka. KIP)
- https://github.com/kaspanet/kaspad — this is the old (deprecated) Kaspa node repository from when it was still written in Go. It may provide some residual benefit to you if you ever want to see how this old code operates. This repository is unmaintained.
Connecting with the Community
Perhaps you have some questions about the topics above or want to keep up with some of the discussions happening. The following resources are the best place to go:
- Discord: https://discord.gg/kaspa — check out the following channels. Feel free to tag the developers or researchers you want to ask directly.
- See #research-general for research and conceptual questions
- See #development to ask developers directly about code-related questions
- See #testnet for latest developments undergoing testing - Telegram: https://t.me/kasparnd — this is the Telegram group where developers and researchers typically collaborate. You can read up on the latest topics here.
- Research Forum: https://research.kas.pa/ — this is where KIPs and new technical concepts that require more long-form discussions take place.
That’s it! Hopefully this serves as a good starting point for your journey into Kaspa. Feel free to reach out to me or any other community member in the Discord to learn more about Kaspa (technical or otherwise). Cheers!
