What are /r/blockstack's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Might be some in your wallet (if you did token sale). Have not checked mine. Lemme know.

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https://blockstack.org/roadmap/

2018 Q4

• Launched the Stacks Blockchain v1, distributed tokens, and sent first Stacks transaction.
• Achieved Milestone 1 and unlocked $25M in capital.
• Released the Stacks blockchain v2 design proposals and start of Rust implementation.
• Released new Stacks Explorer and Wallet.
• Published smart contracting language spec as a Stacks Improvement Proposal (SIP-002).
• Released support for custom Gaia hub configuration during user onboarding.
• Launched App Mining pilot in December with 38 registered apps.

I highly recommend reading the full white paper (virtual blockchain covered in section 4):

https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf

I still can't quite wrap my head around the concrete process, but abstractly, BlockStack uses a virtual block chain which at the moment is virtualized upon the bitcoin block chain. They had it on NameCoin's blockchain, but due to (iirc) some issues with majority control they had to migrate to Bitcoin. Nothing is written the bitcoin blockchain, rather the virtual chain uses bitcoin blockchain as a stable source of truth for its checksums.

Between the virtual blockchain feature and everything but the BNS being off-chain, this is why BlockStack to me seems to be the superior option for Web 3.0. idk if we will actually see it adopted as wide spread as would be needed to consider it the ubiquitous web 3.0 solution, but damn did they design this thing really nicely. Hopefully someone else can give you a better answer on the concrete virtualization process. I read the whitepaper a few times and still don't quite get it...

No one interested in privacy is using the two that you mention. Bitwarden is the recommended password manager: https://www.privacytools.io/software/passwords/

Also, no one who cares about privacy is using Google Chrome yet your app is only available as a chrome extension so I would never use it. Make an extension for Firefox which is what people use who care about privacy.

Here's more info on Blockstack's Gaia Storage System: https://blockstack.org/faq/#what-kind-of-data-does-a-blockstack-dapp-keep-about-me

We’re currently more focused on getting apps on the platform. Apps published by developers doubled in Q4 2018. See Q4 updates here: https://blockstack.org/updates/

With real apps on the platform users can find utility in using these apps and fairly soon we’ll start focusing more on engaged users across all applications.

It’s a chicken and the egg problem with apps and users and starting with apps makes more sense.

— Muneeb

Last adjustment was on October, 2017.

from https://blockstack.org/blog/blockstack-cores-successful-hard-fork-to-version-0-17

> The third efficiency improvement is the adjustment of the BTC/USD exchange rate. The BTC/USD exchange rate is not fixed, which can make the prices of names and namespace fluctuate wildly. If names get too cheap, they will get squatted. If they get too expensive, then no one will buy them. For this reason, the price for names in Blockstack has always been denominated in USD and the exchange rate variable was introduced as a way to continually readjust pricing with every annual hard fork. This preserves affordability while at the same time being a simple and predictable change.

So options are: 1) wait for another hard fork (next year) and purchase the id once hard fork completes 2) wait for BTC to crash and buy buy buy!

Probably best to use just one of the two for simplicity. What specific advantages do you see in using blockstack over namecoin?

For others, there is a comparison here: https://blockstack.org/docs/blockstack-vs-namecoin