Stacks (STX) (used to be called Blockstack)
Main takeaway points:
- Stacks has built a platform that makes Bitcoin practical and efficient.
- Think of Stacks like the Visa system and Bitcoin as the US dollar (not sure if this is the correct analogy?)
- Stacks also enables users to maintain their privacy while participating in the blockchain ecosystem
- The roll out of Nakamoto (the name of their upgrade) will be finished in August 2024. And this will then allow the acceleration of apps/usage.
- This roll out is expected to see the price of STX go up.
So the problem with Bitcoin, is the practical day to day use is difficult.
“Stacks was started in 2017 out of the Princeton Computer Science Department by founders Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea and has been working toward bringing composability to BTC ever since.”
Composability basically means…making Bitcoin practical and useful.
“Stacks is the leading Bitcoin Layer-2, enabling smart contracts and decentralised applications to use Bitcoin as a secure base layer.”
Stacks has built its platform on Bitcoin and its main goals are Security and Stability.
- Stability is easy to understand….the tech works. Ie Transactions have no errors and is fast.
- Security actually has a couple of different aspects to it.
-> First….the transaction is secure and not hacked etc.
-> Second….your anonymity is protected. The Stacks Blockchain enables users to maintain their privacy while participating in the blockchain ecosystem. This is very different to Bitcoin where the blockchain is public.
There are some great articles written on the website Medium. They try to dumb down the tech. Here are some links to those articles and some of the quotes:
Feb 2023.
https://medium.com/@halp1120/stacks-thesis-62ce0599c77f
Dec 2023.
https://medium.com/@halp1120/stx-thesis-update-cd09b7f2cce8
“We view this [Stacks] as the optimal solution to develop a broader Bitcoin economy today and a viable long-term solution.”
“In aggregate the upgrades planned this year [2023 which is now August 2024] will have an enormous impact on the performance of Stacks and will give rise to the first truly composable [practical] and efficient L2 in Bitcoin history. It is hard to overstate the importance of the potential that will unlock. As discussed earlier, Stacks L2 is the most efficient and secure L2 you can build on Bitcoin today without changing Bitcoin L1 — making it a practical and commercial approach that can work today.”
Trying to pick who will turn Bitcoin into a practical day to day use case….is like trying to pick the winner in Search in 1999. Google was only 1 year old. And Yahoo was the king. And there were many others. But I think there are some interesting points to note:
- What are the likely returns from Bitcoin from this point? Are we likely to see the 1000% returns from this point in the next few years? I would say no.
- I think the tech savvy people who got into Bitcoin early, are starting to take their money and put them into businesses/platforms that will turn Bitcoin into a practical day to day use system. That is where the 1000% returns are likely to be.
- I think there will be parallels to ‘the race for Search’ in the 90’s and 2000s. There is first mover and last mover advantage. The first mover in this space is Ethereum. But as Strawman pointed out….has lots of draw backs. I have done some reading from some experienced people. Like “Life After Google” by George Glider and lots of reading on forums and websites. I have been reading about it for about 3-4 years. And STX has gone from hardly any internet traffic/mentions….to loads!
For those wanting to do more research here is some reading:
Start here:
https://www.stacks.co/learn/introduction
https://docs.stacks.co/stacks-101/what-is-stacks
Then the updated white paper:
https://stacks-network.github.io/stacks/stacks.pdf
This talks about the security and privacy of STX:
More detail on Nakomoto upgrade to STX:
https://stacks.org/nakamoto-activation-update
You will need to sign into Medium to view this article…but it is def worth it. THIS IS MUST READ!!!!!!
Some quotes from this MUST READ article:
“If you’re a Dropbox engineer, you can go through my files today. But if I use Dropbox through Blockstack, they have no visibility into the data at all. In other words, Blockstack had found a way to reimagine centralised cloud computing by breaking up internet data centres into fully-encrypted virtual storage lockers. This ensured that even when your data is stored on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure, individual users held the keys to their own data so that only they could control who can access it.”
He also tries to make some future valuations of STX. He has some interesting approaches. Worth a look. He says STX likely price in next year or so $6-7. And if Bull Case....$60.
Happy to (try to) answer any questions!
John
Disclosure: I bought into Stacks in Sept 2020 (AUS $0.22). And have total free carry. And will just let it ride for a decade. I’m not going to sell until I get a 180,000% return (STX priced at $500). Ok ok….I’ll settle for about 100,000%. Haha.
