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So it's a sidechain that ocassionally checks in it's state to bitcoin's main chain? And you can lock up BTC on the mainchain to use it on the sidechain?

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The design can be thought of similar to a side chain but it's not really a side chain. It uses a new type of consensus, called Proof of Transfer (PoX). Stacks miners have visibility into both the Bitcoin chain and the Stacks chain. Leader election happens on Bitcoin and winning leader writes blocks on the Stacks chain. Details: https://blockstack.org/pox.pdf

In essence, yes, it's a sidechain.

From their site:

> Like Bitcoin, Stacks is a layer-1 blockchain. Proof of Transfer connects it to Bitcoin with a 1:1 block ratio.

Not really. The key difference is the degree of involvement Bitcoin miners have in Stacks mining. In side-chains, Bitcoin miners would need to opt-in to mining the side-chain and validate its blocks. In Stacks, Bitcoin miners only need to include the Stacks miners' block-commitment transactions into Bitcoin blocks. Since block-commitment transactions look like normal BTC transactions, no Bitcoin miner involvement is necessary beyond what they're already doing.

The full protocol description can be found in https://github.com/stacksgov/sips (see SIP-001 and SIP-007 in particular).

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