Seconds versus an hour
A payment is safe when undoing it would cost more than anyone could spend. On networks that cost grows with every . Kaspa makes blocks 6,000 times as often as Bitcoin.
Why it matters to you
A shop that waits an hour for Bitcoin to settle can’t sell you a coffee with it. Kaspa’s builders put a typical confirmation at 1 to 3 seconds. That’s the difference between money for savings and money for paying.
How it works: the catch-up race
To undo your payment, an attacker secretly mines a different history and publishes it once it is longer than the real one. Satoshi Nakamoto worked out the odds in the Bitcoin paper: with a share q of all mining, how likely is the attacker to catch up from z blocks behind?
The answer shrinks fast with every block, as long as the attacker has under half. Move the slider to see how long Bitcoin needs.
60 min
Where Kaspa differs
Kaspa uses the same kind of proof-of-work, so the same rule holds: under half of all mining, an attacker falls further behind with every block. Ten blocks a second means the honest side pulls ahead in seconds, not hours.
The formula above assumes a chain. For Kaspa’s web of blocks, the GHOSTDAG paper proves the matching result, as long as the network delay stays inside the margin was set for.
Past half of all mining, any proof-of-work coin can be rewritten. Bitcoin is no exception. What protects both is that buying that much mining costs more than an attack could earn.
What isn’t settled
Kaspa’s total is smaller than Bitcoin’s, so renting half of it costs less. And the 1 to 3 seconds is the builders’ own figure, not an outside audit.
Sources
- Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008), section 11.
- Sompolinsky, Wyborski and Zohar, PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG.
- Kaspa’s 1 to 3 seconds: Yonatan Sompolinsky, as cited on the main page. Checked Oct 30, 2026.