Blockstack Token, what is it?

At Consensus 2017, Muneeb and Ryan announced the Blockstack Token. I couldn’t find any video of this talk, but I’d love to know more about this.

There is a CoinDesk article that talks a bit about it:

Similar to how domains are today registered for a fee on the internet, the new token will be used to file the registration fees paid directly to the network.
Though technical details about the distribution model and other aspects of the token have yet to be settled, Ali and Shea emphasized this is not an ethereum-based ICO, but rather the sale of tokens created by their own technology.
“Currently, we’re launching a single token for Blockstack,” said Ali. “And we’ll have more details on app-specific tokens later.”

This sounds very interesting.

Possibly a response to the question “Why would anyone choose to run a Blockstack server on behalf of others?”.

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Investor USV also wrote a paragraph about it in their about-the-announcement blog post:

Finally, how does the Blockstack Token fit into all of this? For the Blockstack network to work there is some degree of scarcity that has to be maintained. For instance, there is a need for names to be unique. Whenever you have scarcity, you need an allocation mechanism. To that end Blockstack will introduce a token some time later this year. The Blockstack Token will be mined at the layer of the virtual chain and will power operations such as name registration. It will also be used to let Blockstack network participants vote on protocol changes, including a potential migration to another underlying blockchain in the future.

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Can’t figure out how this token will be used for registrations in underlining blockchain. Also, that seemed like an advantage that Bitcoin’s blockchain tokens were used as we only needed to have a single token to proceed a registration. It seems like now we’ll need to acquire blockstack token first?

I want to leave a quick note here that the Blockstack token is meant to only be used on the Blockstack network, like a concert ticket i.e., the concert ticket might have some value in a secondary market (outside of anyone’s control) but its purpose is to get a seat in the concert and that’s the only real use of the ticket.

@muneeb Unfortunately, your note does not clear the situation and any token out there can be compared to concert tickets. Take for example a siacoin: it’s both a blockchain that emits specific token that can be spent in in-house decentralized storage network.

So it is more like you just found a nice word to avoid a bad reputation of ICO scams.

Moreover, blockstack needs a concept of trust