Blockstack Core

Blockstack is a new decentralized internet where you own your data and your apps run locally without remote servers.

Blockstack provides decentralized services for naming/DNS, identity, authentication and storage. Developers can use JavaScript libraries to build serverless apps and they don't need to worry about managing infrastructure.

For more info on Blockstack see: http://github.com/blockstack/blockstack

Blockstack Core is the reference implementation of Blockstack. It is responsible for processing blockchain transactions, creating virtualchain state, and building the peer network amongst other things. Blockstack Core provides a RESTful interface for clients and also comes with a command-line-interface (CLI).

Table of Contents

• Quick Start
• Development Status
• Blockstack Docs
• Contributing
• Community

Quick Start

The fastest way to get started with Blockstack is with pip.

You should use pip2 if you have it instead of pip, since Blockstack requires Python 2.

For Debian & Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python-pip python-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev rng-tools libgmp3-dev
$ sudo pip2 install pyparsing
$ sudo pip2 install blockstack --upgrade

For SUSE and openSUSE

$ sudo zypper update && zypper install rng-tools python-devel libffi-devel
$ sudo pip install blockstack --upgrade 

For macOS:

$ brew install gmp libffi openssl
$ sudo pip install --upgrade pip
$ sudo pip install blockstack --upgrade

You can test your installation by trying:

$ blockstack info 

which should display the last block processed and the latest consensus hash.

After installation, you can start Blockstack Core and index the blockchain:

$ blockstack-core --debug start
$ tail -f ~/.blockstack-server/blockstack-server.log

Next, visit the basic usage docs and extended usage docs to learn how to register names of your own, as well as transfer them and associate data with them.

If you encounter any technical issues in installing or using Blockstack, please search the open issues and start a new one if your issue is not covered.

Development Status

v0.14.1 is the current stable release of Blockstack Core (available on the master branch).
v0.14.2 is the next release candidate for Blockstack Core (available on the v0.14.2 branch).

Most of the development is happening in the v0.14.2 branch. Please submit all pull requests to that branch.

In the list of release notes you can find what has changed in these versions.

Blockstack Docs

You can learn more by visiting the Blockstack Website and checking out the in-depth articles and documentation:

• How Blockstack Works
• Blockstack vs. DNS
• Blockstack vs. Namecoin
• Blockstack Namespaces
• Blockstack Light Clients

You can also read the Blockstack paper:

• "Blockstack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains", Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC ’16), June 2016

If you have high-level questions about Blockstack, try searching our forum and start a new question if your question is not answered there.

Contributing

We welcome any small or big contributions! Please take a moment to review the guidelines for contributing to open source in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Developers: You can try out Blockstack Core in a local sandbox using our integration test framework.

You can install the latest release candidate by:

$ git clone https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core.git
$ blockstack-core/images/scripts/debian-release-candidate.sh

Community

We have an active community of developers and the best place to interact with the community is:

• Mailing List (3,000+ members)
• Blockstack Forum
• Live chat on Slack (2,400+ members)

Copyright and License

The code and documentation copyright are attributed to blockstack.org for the year of 2017.

This code is released under the GPL v3 license, and the docs are released under the Creative Commons license.