Questions miners ask
Kaspa was GPU-mined too, and IceRiver shipped a chip within two years.
- Kaspa never promised chip resistance, and its hash was one fixed function, simple enough to put on silicon. Igneum's program is different every hour, its dataset grows past any fixed memory, and its program space widens every era, with no human involved. The benchmark tool ships in January 2027, and its source is public with the repository at the public testnet, so you run it on your own card and post the number to a leaderboard by card model. The paid independent cryptanalysis and the public benchmark are where a chip design that beats a GPU by more than 2x would show. And if a chip ever appears, miners are the ones who signal the response.
+ Kaspa never promised chip resistance, and its hash was one fixed function, simple enough to put on silicon. Igneum's program is different every hour, its dataset grows past any fixed memory, and its program space widens every era, with no human involved. The public benchmark with a leaderboard ships with the public testnet, and its source is public with the repository then, so you run it on your own card and post the number. The paid independent cryptanalysis and the public benchmark are where a chip design that beats a GPU by more than 2x would show. And if a chip ever appears, miners are the ones who signal the response.
Don't ASICs make a chain safer?
Three parts. First, what the chain asks hash to do. Hash picks who makes the next block. It does not protect history. A checkpoint locks when signatures reach two thirds of the weight of the last 30 days of blocks (specification section 3). A locked checkpoint is never reorganised by any amount of hash: fork choice runs among the tips that pass through every certified checkpoint. Rented hash has no weight today. It can mine blocks. It cannot rewrite anything older than a lock. A renter with 60% of the network holds 0.0% of the vote on day one (the finality simulator, table B); one matching the whole honest network reaches a third of the weight on day 20 and never two thirds. The lock is fast: median 1,018 ms behind the checkpoint on the three-node test network (engineering log, the finality harness), and on the live devnet the first lock came two hours after genesis, once the window was full. Reorganisations under the lock are shallow: at 1, 2 and 5 blocks a second the deepest honest reorganisation measured was 2, 3 and 7 blocks against a determination depth of 20 (ledger F7, round 2, the fast-time network with 100-ms links); across five continents blocks reached every node at p50 343 ms and p99 666 ms (the 12-node cloud network, 4 October 2026).
Second, the cost the ASIC argument skips. Kaspa's hash went to a handful of chip owners within months: the IceRiver KS0 shipped in July 2023, 17 to 20 months after launch; hashrate went from under 100 PH/s to over 700 PH/s in months and the GPU share was negligible by late 2023 (the ASIC history, row 23, approximate for the share). Bitcoin's hash comes from two manufacturers and a few pools (approximate, from memory). The first chip's owner mines in secret with an edge for months: on Monero, 85% of the hashrate vanished at the April 2018 fork, and chips were found at over 85% again four months after the next fork (row 16). A chip does not add security to a chain; it moves the chain's security to whoever owns the chip first.
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One founder, pseudonymous, working with AI systems. The design, the hostile reviews, the code, the simulators and this document were produced that way, and the commit history says so. The software is shipped by Igneum Labs LTD, Unit IH-00-01-01-OF-01, Level 01, Innovation One, Dubai International Financial Centre. The design remains the work of one founder working with AI systems, reviewed in public through the ledger. What that does and does not mean: the measurements are measurements, reproducible from the commands in the engineering log; the simulators are code anyone can run; the design claims stay design claims until people with names have tried to break them. Every criticism the project expects is kept in a ledger with its honest answer, and the entries that were right are marked conceded; the ledger is published with the repository at the public testnet. No cryptographer is hired yet; the plan budgets one for phases 1 and 2, and external reviewers are named and paid before gate 3.
The founders mine from genesis with disclosed addresses and the same software as everyone else, and hold no coins before block one. The team is pseudonymous and there is no team page. The mining addresses and the code history are published with the repository at the public testnet.
Where is the miner?
- On the devnet now. Igneum Ember runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, a HiveOS package exists, and the devnet's coins have no value. The public benchmark with a leaderboard by card model is January 2027. Pools come with the public testnet. The public testnet is weeks away: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens when the go checklist closes. All of it before any coin exists. Nothing is asked of a miner before they can run something. The Ember section says what is shipped and what is still owed.
+ On the devnet now. Igneum Ember runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, a HiveOS package exists, and the devnet's coins have no value. The public benchmark with a leaderboard ships with the public testnet. Pools come with it. The public testnet is weeks away: three seed nodes and the public RPC are up, and it opens when the go checklist closes. All of it before any coin exists. Nothing is asked of a miner before they can run something. The Ember section says what is shipped and what is still owed.
Will my card still pay in a bear market?
Block reward and in-chain proving move with the price. Proving for other chains is priced in the customer's money, and it is a small market today. What Igneum can promise is that its miners' electricity cost in that market is close to power, because the card is already running on domestic power; the price they must charge is the subsidy they forgo, which falls as one over network hash. That is an edge over data-centre provers at scale and nothing more.