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In XXX 2018 Blockstack introduced the stacks&tm; token. The token is specific to the Blockstack ecosystem. It ensures prices of names and namespaces will no longer fluctuate with Bitcoin.
The Stacks token will follow Blockstack Core if it needs to be migrated to a new blockchain, so any tokens you hold now will be useable as long as Blockstack Core exists.
The Stacks token will make it possible for light clients to calculate the economic weight of different Blockstack Core chain forks, and identify the fork with the most economic activity. Today, light clients have to be told a priori which fork to use.
The Stacks token will make it possible to implement proof-of-burn mining, a new type of blockchain mining algorithm where instead of burning electricity to produce blocks, miners burn an existing cryptocurrency. PoB mining is useful because it moves Blockstack transactions off of Bitcoin while keeping the security properties Bitcoin offers, and it enables decentralized app-specific chains to be built on top of Blockstack.
The Stacks token will make it possible to implement full-fledged smart contracts. Right now, Blockstack Core supports a very simple kind of smart contract (namespaces), but in the future it will support any smart contract written in a non-Turing-complete Lisp dialect we’re developing. The language will be expressive enough to implement things like name/namespace auctions and name trading on-chain. Before this can go live, however, there needs to be a way to incentivize miners to process a smart contract’s execution. The Stacks token enables this.t