Stories · as read on the Mining station
Mining Stacks With Bitcoin
Blockstack's Xan Ditkoff explained how Stacks 2.0 miners bid Bitcoin instead of electricity, and how stackers are paid in that Bitcoin.
Bitcoin miners pay for electricity. In July 2020, Xan Ditkoff of Blockstack described a network where miners pay in Bitcoin instead. Ditkoff, Blockstack's production and growth partner, spoke at Mining Disrupt Covid Online 2020, held July 22 and 23, 2020. That was 2,273 days ago.
Bitcoin traded at $9,530 then. On October 12, 2026 it was $83,426. His subject was Proof of Transfer, the consensus design for the Stacks 2.0 upgrade. In his words, proof of transfer is essentially a consensus mechanism that transfers a base cryptocurrency to mint units of a new cryptocurrency.
For Stacks, that base currency is Bitcoin. There are two kinds of participants. Stacks miners send Bitcoin to compete for new Stacks tokens. Stackers lock up their Stacks tokens and earn the Bitcoin those miners spend.
Ditkoff compared it to proof-of-work. A Bitcoin miner pays for electricity, something of known value, for the chance to mint something new. A Stacks miner pays in Bitcoin. He said that means there is no need for special hardware or big CPU capacity.
Anyone can mine Stacks with some amount of Bitcoin. Here is how a block is won. Each miner sends Bitcoin along with the block they propose. The protocol combines those payments with a verifiable random function to pick the leader.
The more Bitcoin a miner commits, the better the odds, but there is always some randomness. Stacking runs on a roughly seven-day cycle, with a prepare phase and a reward phase. In the prepare phase, a stacker locks up Stacks tokens and broadcasts a signed message naming a Bitcoin address. There is a minimum: at least 0.02 percent of the circulating supply of Stacks.
Ditkoff said holders can pool and delegate to reach it without giving up custody, and that the minimum exists to limit how many addresses the protocol pays in one reward phase. Then the payouts begin. The protocol pays five addresses each block over the next seven days until every eligible stacker is paid. As Ditkoff put it, they are paid with the bitcoin that miners are spending to compete to mine each block.
He said the two sides form an economic flywheel, with room for pooling and delegation services. Blockstack's Reg A offering had left four to five thousand Stacks token holders who would need them. In July 2020 the Stacks 2.0 testnet was live, with stacking and the full Proof of Transfer still to be added in the weeks ahead. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.