As Novogratz said this weekend, if you’re not long your short my friends. Not to dismiss the feeling of loss during times like this. Only to highlight the better options available in longer timeframes. Because, if you thought we were above a Billionaire publicly influencing the price of Bitcoin in the short term. We’re not quite there just yet, but their time is fleeting. As Chinese miners and citizens begin to comply with their local government, a lot of coins have moved from the East to the West this week. Seeing new addresses continuing to grow exponentially, price does not reflect Bitcoins continued network effects. Or downplay all the incredible news about the future of Bitcoin released this week from the conference. One of those projects in attendance is the focus of this week’s review with Stacks.
Introduction
Stacks; formally known as Blockstack, is an open-source network of decentralized apps and smart contracts built on Bitcoin. Stacks unleashes Bitcoin’s full potential as a programmable base layer. Stacks connects to Bitcoin and makes it programmable, enabling you to build apps, smart contracts, and digital assets that are integrated with Bitcoin’s security, capital, and network. Apps built on Stacks run their logic on a blockchain controlled by code instead of companies. Making them easily accessible to anyone enables decentralized apps to do things that regular apps can’t. Stacks uses Clarity, a safe and predictable language for smart contracts. Clarity smart contracts have visibility into the Bitcoin state and can include Bitcoin-based logic. Every Bitcoin block, Stack transactions are batched and hashed on the Bitcoin blockchain. This makes all Stacks transactions inherit Bitcoin’s finality and settlement, with Stacks transactions verified on the Bitcoin blockchain. As the name implies, you can lock your Stacks tokens to earn Bitcoin through the Proof-of-transfer (PoX) consensus mechanism in the Stacking Club. Just like Bitcoin miners run mining software to support the Bitcoin blockchain and earn BTC, you can support the Stacks blockchain and earn BTC by locking up their native tokens.
While Stacks makes no modification to the Bitcoin design, it uses PoX as a new consensus mechanism designed for the Stacks blockchain. Using the security of the Bitcoin blockchain’s proof-of-work system, by requiring miners to spend BTC to win the block reward for a Stacks block. The winning miner is selected randomly, with their chance of winning the block being proportional to the amount of BTC that they spend. Adding new features to the Bitcoin blockchain poses many challenges. Bitcoin is secure because of its stability and immutability. While it possesses a scripting language, this language is limited. By design, adding complexity increases the attack surface and reduces the value of Bitcoin as a foundational layer. The Stacks blockchain is an attempt to create this blockchain, and over its lifetime, they have explored the design space for establishing novel, feature-rich blockchains on top of Bitcoin while using it as a trusted foundation. The Stacks blockchain operates as a “virtual blockchain” on top of Bitcoin. Each transaction in the Stacks chain is also a Bitcoin transaction. All data in a Stack transaction is encoded within the metadata of a Bitcoin transaction. But, Stack transactions must be separately…
Hi! My name is Lark Davis!
I’m a cryptocurrency investor with years of experience and I’ve been making consistent profits in the crypto space.
I’m passionate about helping others do the same, so I run multiple educational channels on crypto investing.
