Blockstack Hackathon Attendee Guide
Welcome, this guide is designed to help you be successful during the hackathon you're attending and surface resources you may need related to Blockstack. We're excited to support you, so please don't hesitate to let us know how things are going and where you need help.

We highly recommend you at least skim this guide, however, if you choose to skip ahead, the number 1 place to check out (for developers) is blockstack.org/devs.
Who and What Is Blockstack, A Little Background:
Blockstack is a new internet for decentralized apps. Our open-source community of 13,195 members globally is building protocols & tools that make it easy to build scalable decentralized apps. Blockstack comes with authentication, user data portability, decentralized storage, mobile SDKs, a testnet, and more!

Blockstack PBC, a Public Benefit Corp, was co-founded by Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali to contribute to the development of the core open-source software. Blockstack PBC has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Toronto.
Blockstack PBC raised a $4M Series A in January 2017, and $50M in the Blockstack Token Sale in December 2017. We are grateful to have investors like Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Naval Ravikant, Winklevoss Capital, Digital Currency Group, Foundation Capital, Kevin Rose, and Michael Arrington amongst others. Our token sale had 800 Accredited Investors and 8000+ total participants.
Mission

Blockstack's mission is to enable an open, decentralized internet which will benefit all internet users by giving them more control over information and computation. We're committed to always support the decentralization of the Blockstack network and ensure that we build the network in a way that no single entity, including Blockstack PBC, has control over it.
We're based in NY, but have teammates and community around the world, you might even meet some of them this weekend, we try to be everywhere we can to support developers hands-on when they start new hackathon projects. If we're not in attendance, please join us on Slack and our community of #engineers will gladly help!

We're committed to build a safer, more secure, and more user controlled new internet. We believe decentralization is key to personal freedom and to innovation. You can learn more about our technology and how to use below, we also recommend our whitepapers!
Stats

  • 3+ years in production
  • 74,000+ domains registered
  • Over 7,000 members in the developer community
  • 4,000+ Slack community members
  • 7,000+ Meet-Up Members, with events spanning 23 cities in 12 countries
Thanks for joining us!

Getting Started: The Blockstack Browser (get Stacks Tokens!)
No matter who you are, you need a way to browse decentralized applications. The Blockstack Browser is the first place developers and users alike should start their experience with Blockstack and dapps.

→ You can download and install the browser right here - https://blockstack.org/install
→ Once completed you can signup for your Blockstack ID. Best part, we'll reward you just for doing it! After you're done check out this task on the Community Rewards Program page and complete it to get your Stacks Tokens.

What is a Blockstack ID?

This is your name & identity that is registered in the .id namespace on Blockstack. Your personal data and storage are built around this ID. Apps that want to access your data use your permission and identity to find it.

Key Resources:
THE starting place for developers:

Always a work in progress, we've put together this page with what we think are the most important resources. For those so inclined, also feel free to jump straight into Github.
Starting for non-developers:

Admittedly our resources are very developer centric, but we're working hard to build out the ecosystem. Here are a few ways to be involved as a non-developer and some instructions on installing the Blockstack Browser so you can engage with awesome decentralized applications, or 'dapps'.

Helpful links:

Other Goodies:

Support:

Support:
Did the team running your event offer you our feedback form? If not, we appreciate any time you can take in completing it or jumping to our Forum for further conversation and support.

Is this guide missing something? Please let us know by emailing the Community team here at Blockstack PBC - [email protected].