Thread by @DesheShai

1/n On November 1st, the #dagknight protocol will finally be revealed in SECS22 Berkeley (cesc.io). I think it is only appropriate to take the time to explain what makes DAGknight so exciting, and what it means for PoW in general and $kas in particular. 🧵

2/n First, a clarification: DAGKnight is the brainchild of @MichaelSuttonIL with the advisory of @hashdag. The basis for DAGKnight are ideas Michael and myself came up with to solve the pruning problem in DAGs (Medium post pending) but I was never directly involved with DAGKnight

3/n So what makes DAGKnight so exciting? Simply put, it is the *perfect* PoW based consensus algorithm. It satisfies all points in the desiderata.

Recall that the huge advantage of GHOSTDAG over all other PoW algorithms is that it removes the security constraints on throughput.

4/n In all other techs, increasing the block rate directly increases orphan rates whereby killing the security. Some techs allow sharding the network and then increasing the number of shards while retaining slow blockrates on each separate shard, whereby increasing the blockrate

5/n but retaining slow confirmation times as well as many other issues consequential to sharding such as load balancing and data availability issues. However, they still do not allow increasing the block rate in each shard.

GHOSTDAG is the first PoW to allow reducing block rates

6/n on a non-sharded network, which is the reason it can achieve unprecedented confirmation times. However, GHOSTDAG is still limited in the sense that it is *non-responsive to network latency*. That is, we still need to hardwire an upper bound on network latency (which we can

6.5/n assume holds 95% of the time), and the rest of the properties of the network (in particular, confirmation times) are derived from this bound. This means that the performance does not improve as latency improves, and worse, that the security is compromised if the network

7/n latency deteriorates. This is true for *all* existing PoW algorithms, with the only exception being SPECTRE, another algorithm conceived by @hashdag, which he once described to me as his "most beautiful creation".

However, SPECTRE has a

8/n different flaw: it does not provide a linear ordering, and blocks can switch places long after they were confirmed (though never in a way which invalidates transactions). This is fine for a distributed ledger, but abysmal for smart-contracts, which is why it was decided that

9/n Kaspa would implement GHOSTDAG and not SPECTRE.

And now we have DAGKnight, which achieves *both*, and is the first consensus protocol to have it all: 1. Nakamoto consensus security independent of block rates (like GHOSTDAG and SPECTRE), 2. rapidly converging linear ordering

10/n (like GHOSTDAG), and 3. responsiveness to *actual* network latency (like SPECTRE).

Simply put, it is a PoW consensus algorithm which has no speed limitations beyond hardware, suitable for smart-contracts, AND *scales itself* as network latency is improved.

11/n This is the true epitome of what PoW can be, and should make PoW proponents very excited!

(And a bonus feature is that the combinatorial similarities of GHOSTDAG and DAGKnight make it that many of the utilities required to implement DAGKnight are already present in Kaspa)