Draft of Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper -- feedback welcome!

Hey everyone, excited to share an early draft of the Stacks 2.0 whitepaper. It’s meant to be light read that gives an overview and references the technical details. There is a need for a simplified place to point people that are looking to understand the big, important parts of the ecosystem, but don’t necessarily have the time or background to do a deeper technical dive.

It’s amazing how quickly our project evolved. Our earlier published research papers, the 2017 whitepaper, and the token economics paper are already outdated. The Stacks 2.0 whitepaper is meant to give you the most up-to-date information. We plan to redirect the earlier papers to this whitepaper after it’s released. The PoX consensus, first of its kind between two blockchains, is a unique concept and can be a bit challenging for people to understand. It’d be great to simplify the description as much as possible. I’m looking for feedback on the paper, especially on PoX and stacking. Your comments can help polish the paper, and simplify these concepts. Please point out any information that you think is important and is not currently covered in the draft.

A few community members have already offered to translate the whitepaper into other languages. Such translations help a lot! We can make a list of various translation efforts below in the thread. Feel free to add suggestions for languages we should cover or volunteers who can help. Your input can help our mission of building a user-owned internet on Bitcoin — thank you!

To provide feedback, you can open the paper on Dropbox and use the comment feature or you can leave your comments in reply to this thread below. –> Open the Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper

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It is a good introduction that makes complex concepts accessible to a broader audience. It also helps to have all the main points summarized in a document.

If you are absolutely new to Stacks I would go directly to Introduction and then Summary.

As Muneeb says, it’s not a technical paper, and it’s meant for a broader audience. But I would not say that it is for everybody. It would be best if you had some basic understanding of the crypto world.

I would like to have an even more easy document for absolute beginners. Something that could be accessible for people that is just interested in technology in a broader sense.

Perhaps you are not aware, but many people love technology, maybe even programmers or front-end developers that do not know what a whitepaper is or the meaning of Mainet, for instance.

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Agree that opening up the work to broader audience can help a lot. I intentionally kept this one a light read (more like a “litepaper” instead of a technical paper). Engineers can always dig into the details on GitHub and read the SIPs etc.

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I incorporated some comments and published a version more broadly here. I plan to make minor updates and increment the version number as more comments come in.

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Muneeb the mention of 400+ apps (that are functional), do you still want to say that now likely outdated qty versus say “hundreds” or “dozens”?

I tried to translate this White Paper into the Catalan language, but I do not have the required technical background to make a proper and accurate translation. There are some concepts that I do not know deep enough to be able to translate into my language. In Catalonia, the general English level of people interested in that area is usually good enough to read the original English version. For instance, I studied for a Ph.D. in Marketing, and most of the reading was in English, and an adequate level of that language was a requirement to access the courses.

I begin to translate the text, and I realized that my version was worse than the original and could have technical imprecisions. My document probably could not bring any improvement to a Catalan language speaker. If a Catalan person is interested in this document and can understand the main concepts, he probably already has a good level of English language. All this makes my translation useless.

I would be happy to help in any other way to make this document and Stacks concepts more accessible to the Catalan language community.