Today we’re proud to announce the release of our public Stacks testnet! The Stacks testnet represents a significant milestone on the path to releasing the Stacks token system—most of the token infrastructure is written and working. You can access the testnet at testnet.blockstack.org.
On the Stacks testnet, developers can experiment with:
Sending and receiving Stacks tokens
Buying names and namespaces with Stacks tokens
Registering subdomains
Using our new Blockstack command-line tool
The testnet is made of fully functional Blockstack Core nodes, and lets you do all the same things you would do on mainnet. The differences are that it uses testnet tokens (the testnet website can give them to you), and the block time is 1 minute instead of 10 minutes.
If you’re a developer or power user who wants an early glimpse of the token system, go grab the new CLI tool and start hacking! If you find any bugs, please let us know.
Really excited to see this live! The testnet is a major step towards pushing the first version of the new blockchain live. For anyone wondering about Milestone 1 from our token sale, yes this is significant progress towards meeting that milestone.
We’ll still be using Bitcoin to secure the Stacks chain. Long-term, only Stacks miners will need to interact with Bitcoin (through proof-of-burn mining) in order to append new Stacks blocks. Users will only transact in Stacks, and will send Stacks transactions through the Stacks network so Stacks miners can pick them up.
In the short term (which this testnet demonstrates), there is not yet any Stacks mining. Instead, each user is a miner—they mine 1-transaction blocks with Bitcoin in order to anchor their Stacks transaction to it.
So, I run a Blockstack node now, in the long term (when stacks goes mainnet), will folks running a Blockstack node also be running a Bitcoin node or will it be just a Stacks node?
Not able to run it on mac:
I clones cli-blockstack repo and installed feature/stack-transactions branch of blockstack.js
when i try to run sudo npm link, it fails saying couldn’t find module blockstack
src/cli.js:3
3: const blockstack = require(‘blockstack’);
^^^^^^^^^^^^ blockstack. Required module not found
src/keys.js:3
3: const blockstack = require(‘blockstack’)
^^^^^^^^^^^^ blockstack. Required module not found
src/network.js:3
3: const blockstack = require(‘blockstack’);
^^^^^^^^^^^^ blockstack. Required module not found
You need to install blockstack.js from source: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js. Once you have cloned the repository, you need to check out and install the feature/stacks-transactions branch, run npm install, and then sudo npm link.
Once you have done this, you must install the CLI from source: https://github.com/jcnelson/cli-blockstack. Then, you need to run npm link blockstack to link the feature/stacks-transactions branch you installed into the node_modules directory for cli-blockstack. After that, you can run sudo npm link to install the CLI to /usr/bin/cli-blockstack.
This error is due to a known bug in flow that prevents it from following symlinks in node_modules (i.e. the result of npm link blockstack). They can be ignored.
Here’s what worked for me running node with config locally, instead of using global/sudo on Debian:
git clone https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js
cd blockstack.js
git checkout -b feature/stack-transactions
npm install
npm run build
npm link
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/jcnelson/cli-blockstack
cd cli-blockstack
npm link blockstack
npm install
I was having a hard time using Gitcheckout. For some reason it was installing version 17.2.0 when I checked the package.json file. Instead of using Gitcheckout I just downloaded the Feature/Stacks-Transactions branch directly onto my computer, renamed it Blockstack.js and dropped it in the file. I then ran npm install and sudo npm link. After that everything worked when installing the CLI. Let me know if that works for you.
. Is this by design or bug?