Where does the money for registrations go?

Core Blockchain
#1

Muoitran on r/blockstack asked the question:

Hi, Just a few newbie questions after I read your white paper: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mfreed/docs/blockstack-atc16.pdf 1. Where does the registration fee go? 2. Who pays for the data storage on the cloud? 3. How does the abstraction for names transferring look like in a Bitcoin transaction?
Thanks

The money that users spend to register names is “destroyed” meaning that it is sent to a “black hole” address from which no one can recover the money. In a way this is equivalent to giving the money away to everyone in the ecosystem (because the value of the underlying cryptocurrency goes up if parts of the currency is destroyed).

We’ve debated moving to a model where the payments go to miners instead. See this discussion on Github.

I can answer your question about storage costs separately. Basically, users pay for their own storage by connecting their Dropbox/Gdrive etc.

For an example of name transfer transaction see operations in this block on the Blockstack explorer.

#2

Thank @muneeb,
Is there any wiki page where I can find more about the meaning of the opcodes and the format of a blockstack operation?
From my understanding, name pre_order cost some bitcoins to the black hole, e.g. 0.00025BTC, name registration costs few more coins to the binding Bitcoin address, e.g. 0.000055BTC and name transferring is actually transferring that 0.000055BTC from bound address to the new address?
I will highly appreciate if you can explain how an update operator works?

#3

We’re trying to move all protocol specifications to this Github repo: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack

Earlier they were on different repositories and wikis and even documented in the code. So trying to have just one place where all protocol specifications, documentation, and RFCs are.

Here is the old documentation and we’ll move this and update the docs. Please star/watch the blockstack/blockstack repo to stay updated.