[vorpalhex]

I'm interested in the idea but can't say I'm very much into Blockstack after looking into it. The fact that they're tied heavily in the blockchain and pay large sums to apps in the name of "app mining" is.. concerning. Even after a fair bit of research, the origin of the money is extremely unclear.

[muneeb]

Muneeb from Blockstack here. The Stacks blockchain is needed to anchor user identities in a system that is not controlled by any single company.

The App Mining rewards are incentives for developers to improve their app quality. I'd recommend this research paper to dig deeper in to the game theory behind App Mining: https://blog.blockstack.org/app-mining-game-theory-algorithm...

The source of money is newly minted tokens, just like in Bitcoin the miners operating the nodes and processing transactions get the newly minted tokens.

[vorpalhex]

> The source of money is newly minted tokens, just like in Bitcoin the miners operating the nodes and processing transactions get the newly minted tokens.

Ok, so where are those tokens being minted? In the apps themselves? Who's buying them since they don't seem to be publicly buyable?

Because my concern would be that my journal/calculator/paint app are running CPU intensive mining with or without code injection and connecting to a large amount of foreign peers just for the sake of storing my data in storage I own...

[KevinNTH]

As a software engineer, I built Gekri with performance in mind (of course, there is always more optimizations to perform but I feel the app pretty quick by now). I will never allow this kind of computation on any app that I create.

Think about App mining as rewards to developers from Blockstack PBC.

[vorpalhex]

We're caught in a circular trap here. Money doesn't come from nowhere (let's put aside actual fiat currencies for a moment) and the payouts aren't in tokens as far as I'm aware.

1. Who is putting the money into the system? An outside investor? Miners?

2. Blockstack is putting out significant amounts of cash and are a private company. How do they intend to profit off of this in the future? Selling user data? Injecting ads?

[muneeb]

The pay outs are in Stacks (STX) tokens. Only the pilot phase was in USD/BTC which came from a developer growth/marketing budget that Blockstack PBC funded.

See this post for details: https://blog.blockstack.org/app-mining-plans-to-pay-blocksta...

Newly minted tokens as incentives have been in use since Bitcoin started 10+ years ago. We are using that concept for developer incentives.

[peternicky]

Waiting patiently for answers; the responses are not comforting.

[muneeb]

See reply above. Thanks,

[justusthane]

On your website, it seems that the overview and documentation is targeted at developers. As a user, I would love an easy-to-understand overview of what Blockstack is, how it works, and why I should care.

Edit: And here's a question maybe you can answer for me directly: If the user data is stored in a location of my choice, and the code runs on the client, what's the point of an app being powered by Blockstack rather than just being a local offline app that saves data to iCloud/Dropbox/whatever?

Thanks!

[muneeb]

The point is global coordination without going through a big company like Facebook.

Take the Dmails app for example, you can email me there on muneeb.id -- this will not be possible with an offline app.

I hear you on the developer focus for Blockstack. We might start a different brand that is consumer-focused. Right now the best page for consumer info is: https://blockstack.org/try-blockstack

[justusthane]

Great, thanks. I'll explore it and try to understand it better! Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[KevinNTH]

As I said [1] I wanted the journal to be online so I can use the app from the laptop and then from the mobile. I will implement offline sync soon.

Beside, I may want to implement social features in the future. There is so many things that can be done and I'm exploring some possibilities :)

[1] https://twitter.com/pixelwerk/status/1159532787843706881

[justusthane]

Hey Kevin, sorry for the confusion - my question was for Muneeb about Blockstack specifically.

Your journal app looks great. I've created an account and look forward to trying it out!