are you running kaspa?

Care to clarify objectively what you mean by “running Kaspa”?

you sound like a kaspa user, are you running the kaspa on your computer?

Yes. And you can too:

MyKAI

MyKAI — Run a Kaspa node in 1 click

Help the Kaspa network. Run a node in 1 click — for non-tech users.

that's not running kaspa, it just a peeking node/relay. so you're trusting a handful of full real nodes for the entire history of the chain, since your pruned node doesn't replay anything. it just accepts a UTXO snapshot. if those archival nodes lie, you can't detect it if you weren't listening during that time. and if the ~317 node operators wanted to change the rules, what stops them? you just had a hard fork last month that the whole community "smoothly" complied with, and the installer you linked auto-updates itself. that's not a decentralized consensus, that's a dev team with a release schedule. also curious what the bandwidth looks like at 100 bps, since you're already throttled to 9 peers just to make 10 bps manageable on normal hardware. it sounds like another high-throughput-first crypto project, but with the illusion of node running.

that's exactly what i said. i also don't like bitcoin pruned nodes but they will at a least replay everything from the genesis. kaspa will just trust the PoW as if it verifies the txs somehow. that's very similar to a bitcoin spv node. you said it yourself, you are using PoW as a trust mechanism to pick the chain, you are not validating blocks older than utxoset snapshot. you have no idea what older txs are, you are not validating that. you have no power to go "ah this old tx makes no sense, let's blacklist this block and find another chain without it". miners and full nodes control your chain/DAG. you trust the PoW, you dont verify. that's literally a SPV node. and starting from utxoset snapshot is not a cool feature of kaspa that's just sacrificing verification for faster IDB. why? because you produce 10blocks per seconds right now. no normal user can sync that. its terabytes of data even now. bitcoin limits block size and time on purpose to keep the chain small. because its the global state that every bitcoin user has to verify and sync with. then we have things like lightning, ark or others that create isolated states where not everyone has to sync with. that's how scaling works in any system, not just bitcoin. your design sacrifices sovereignty, decentralization, and verification in favor of blocks-per-second. View article → and i said the node you linked only connects to 9 nodes because again a normal home hardware and internet can't handle 10 blocks per second i guess. how much bandwidth does that thing spent that you/they had to lower the node count to only 9? why not 50 nodes? you say you are running kaspa, but all you have is a pruned SPV client with ✨DAG✨. by desig kaspa is controlled by the miners and "archival" full nodes. you dont have a power to say "no". because you trust pow, don't verify.

A Kaspa pruned node fully and independently validates every single transaction and block within its active consensus window. It executes the exact same validation code as an archival node. It calculates the cryptographic state changes itself. The only thing it does is discard the data once it passes the pruning point. A Bitcoin SPV node does not verify transactions at all. An SPV node download headers, looks at the Merkle root, and says, "Well, the miners put this transaction in a block, so I guess it’s valid." It completely skips checking for double-spends or fake coins. They are not the same at all. You assume that because you don't have the data from 2023, you cannot verify the state today. But in a UTXO-based ledger, the current UTXO set is the condensed, mathematically proven result of all previous history. If a miner tried to invent fake coins out of thin air in 2023, the resulting UTXO set today would have an invalid cryptographic hash. A Kaspa node would instantly reject the snapshot because the cumulative Proof-of-Work headers wouldn't match. Even on a full node in Bitcoin, if a user running a full node discovers a bad transaction from 2013 today, they cannot change it. If they try to unilaterally "blacklist" that old block, their node will simply split from the network, put itself on an isolated, useless island, and they will be left completely alone. You are confusing data storage with consensus validation. A Bitcoin SPV node checks zero rules and trusts miners blindly. A Kaspa pruned node checks all rules for current consensus and trusts nobody. It executes full cryptographic verification of every block and transaction in its window. If your definition of decentralization requires every participant to host a permanent archive of historical coffee purchases from three years ago on a Raspberry Pi, then yes, Kaspa doesn't fit your definition. But if decentralization means that any user can independently enforce the current rules of the network, prevent inflation, and validate their own financial state using raw math and Proof-of-Work, then a Kaspa node is as much of a full node as Bitcoin—it just throws away the trash when it's done. Again, you don’t understand, and that’s ok. I’m used to it. Bitcoin religious zealots are many.