Ergo and Kaspa are two cryptocurrencies that have been gaining attention in the crypto space. Both have their unique features and technologies, but when it comes to well-researched, known methods, and tried and tested principles, Ergo stands out as the superior choice.
Ergo is a decentralized blockchain platform designed to provide an efficient, secure, and easy way to implement financial contracts. It uses a unique consensus algorithm called Autolykos, a Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm designed to be ASIC-resistant. This makes it more decentralized and fairer than other PoW cryptocurrencies. Ergo also features smart contract capabilities, with its own language called ErgoScript, which is a powerful and protocol-friendly scripting language for cryptocurrencies. This makes it possible to create complex financial contracts on the Ergo platform. Furthermore, Ergo emphasizes privacy, with features such as “ring signatures” and “zero-knowledge proofs” to ensure transactions can be private.
In 2023, Ergo continued to make strides in its development. The Ergo Summit celebrated progress within the ecosystem. EIP-27, a proposal to adjust the emission schedule of ERG to extend the mining rewards beyond the original eight-year schedule, marked an important milestone for the Ergo network and ecosystem.
On the other hand, Kaspa, which uses the ghostDAG protocol, is still experimental and may not be the best place for robust financial contracts. As noted by kushti khushi, a core developer of Ergo, after examining Kaspa’s core code, he expressed doubts about the introduction of smart contracts on the Kaspa platform due to its complex input signing with different sighash options taken from Bitcoin. He also questioned the use of muhash for state authentication in Kaspa, and why an incremental hash was used instead of an authenticated dictionary. The presence of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) in Kaspa could lead to a verification dilemma, which might not have been adequately addressed in the ghostDAG paper and its continuations.
In 2023, Kaspa was still in the development phase, with a white paper scheduled for release that would combine Kaspa’s past research and current goals into a cohesive document. Kaspa also achieved a milestone by reaching 10 Blocks Per Second (BPS) on its testnet, setting a new standard in the world of cryptography. However, these developments are still in the experimental stage, and the platform’s suitability for robust financial contracts remains to be seen.
In conclusion, while Kaspa’s ghostDAG protocol presents an interesting and innovative approach to blockchain technology, its experimental nature and potential issues suggest that it may not be the most reliable platform for financial contracts. On the other hand, Ergo, with its well-researched and tested principles, offers a more solid and reliable platform for such purposes. As always, potential investors should conduct their own research and consider their risk tolerance before investing in any cryptocurrency.
| Feature | Ergo (ERG) | Kaspa (KSP) |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus Mechanism | Autolykos (Proof-of-Work) | ghostDAG protocol |
| Smart Contracts | Yes, with ErgoScript | No |
| Privacy Features | Yes, includes ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs | No |
| Scalability | Aims to solve scalability with the power of eUTXO, NiPoPoWs and other novel features | Aims to solve scalability issues with ghostDAG protocol |
| Use Cases | Financial contracts | Fast transactions |
| ASIC-Resistant | Yes | No, ASICs are on the network |
| Language-base | JVM | Go |
The aim of Kaspa is to become the fastest, most scalable, and secure L1 PoW crypto. And while we feel we have already reached this benchmark, there still exists some fine-tuning for peak performance. However, performance for the sake of performance is not the end goal of Kaspa. The broader goal is to create the ultimate Layer 1 to implement smart contracts, Defi, and Layer 2 applications over it. It’s our hope that a future ecosystem will arise on Kaspa that will be as strong as the foundation and wonderful community that helped birth it.
Kaspa has plans to implement smart contracts in future, however it’s hard to imagine how this could compete to the sophisticated smart contract language that was built from scratch alongside Ergo.
In July 2023, there was some controversary online as users discovered that 3,944,700,000 KAS were mined between 7 Nov 2021 and 8 Feb 2022 with no block history. Kaspa confirmed that the data had been lost and they were attempting to recover it via a community push.
This is because they’re reference client only stores the past 3 days.
The functionality here is somewhat similar to UTXO Set Snapshots in Ergo, but Ergo offers the added advantage of being able to restore blocks from Explorer data and verify merkle and AVL trees.
In Ergo, transactions are committed separately from being witnessed, and their byte representation is deterministic. This means that you can restore serialized transactions and verify merkle tree roots even if transactions are available as JSONs and without signatures. The pregenesis data is set in the configuration, and the pregenesis state is also deterministic. This allows you to restore state transformations and verify them against hashes in the header.
However, it seems that Kaspa might be lacking some of these features that are present in Ergo.
The speed of transaction confirmations depends on the amount of hashpower you’re willing to trust. If you’re comfortable trusting less hashpower, you’ll receive faster confirmations. This is because waiting for a certain amount of hashpower to confirm your transaction doesn’t benefit from faster blocks.
For this purpose, on Ergo, sub-block confirmation protocols can be developed.
kushti khushi, 7 Aug 2023:
Checked yesterday Kaspa core code a bit, I doubt introduction of smart contracts will be simple, on top of input signing with different sighash option taken from bitcoin they have
Also, have some doubts about muhash they are using for state authentication, and not clear why incremental hash was used instead of authenticated dictionary
And verification dilemma in the presence of dag could hit hard, have to check how it was accounted in ghostdag paper and its continuations, probably just skipped
Yonatan has an idea back in 2017 to have client side validation, so miners in this case can include double spends and other invalid but well formed transactions
Which is solving verification dilemma for miners at least but a very different beast from blockchains we know
But Kaspa is so extreme from initial investigation
Sorry, not so extreme. Good for ordinary folks like exchange engineers coming to develop on Kaspa, but in the presence of dag and smart contracts verification dilemma could hit hard. Need to check for more whats there maybe next weekend