Red Lang goes blockchain

I like Red, and I have been following it. I dabbled with Rebol back in my Amiga days, but not much. Red is a nice batteries-included, small, Lispy-forth language in my perception.<p>I am sticking with my Lisps (SBCL, Racket, Emacs Lisp, Shen, and Wasp Lisp) for now, and my beloved J [2], but I love the size of the whole Red&#x2F;Red System environment. I think it is going to take off.<p>I know Naned, the man behind Red, was CEO of Fullstack Technologies, and it was based in Beijing after an initial $500k VC funding round from Chinese VCs [1].<p>Curiously, I predict a bunch of conspiracy theory people to relate Red = Communism, Blockchain&#x2F;ICO&#x2F;Coins = Socialized currency, and a decentralized internet running DAPPs to dilute the USA&#x27;s currernt juice in the internet all with a connection back to China, but I am ecstatic about a distributed internet that cannot be censored like it is in China, or in less obvious ways in the US. I missed the Bitcoin buy-in when it was selling at $200-something, but I always knew in my readings that the blockchain is its secret sauce. Aside from the energy expenditure, I like the concept. How can it, or can it become energy efficient, but still stay difficult to mine to work out both ways? Seems like it will not be possible. You cannot make it easy for everyone, and hard enough to have value...<p><pre><code> [1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.red-lang.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;dream-big-work-hard-and-make-it-happen.html [2] jsoftware.com</code></pre>

<i>edit</i><p>I know we&#x27;re all experiencing blockchain fatigue, but for once, I actually know what the tokens will be used for (beyond the usual snake-oil that other ICOs sell). For reference:<p>Some of the target usages for the token holders, will include:<p>- voting rights: influence the Red roadmap, vote for features and issue tickets.<p>- tipping: useful chat posts, code contributions, learning materials providers, etc.<p>- intra-community cryptoeconomics (or rather tokenomics): selling&#x2F;buying services from other community members (coding tasks, consulting, learning help, bug fixing, decentralized gaming, etc.)<p>- paid Dapps, or in-app purchases.<p>In addition to that, the foundation will hold a significant amount of RCT, which will be used for rewarding:<p>- code contributions<p>- Red-related online learning or presenting materials (blog, documentations, etc.)<p>- promotional actions (presenting Red at a conference)<p>- any other actions that will help spread Red and make the community grow up.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I personally agree with turning the org into a &quot;dapp&quot;, unless language-design remains with the core designers of the language and doesn&#x27;t become influenced by decentralized decisions. <i>edit: It looks like &quot;voting rights&quot; may actually impact this</i><p>There is always an issue with OSS projects struggling for funding. Regardless of how flawed the idea may be, at least they are trying to find a model to sustain themselves. It certainly trumps the model of depending on big-tech-company-X giving you handouts for your SSL library.

Oh boy. It would suck ass to see those guys busted by SEC for offering unregistered securities. The voting rights will definitely make it a security from SEC&#x27;s standpoint, so the only question is whether they will be considered too small of a fish to bother.<p>The irony with the ICO market is that it&#x27;s safe for total scams with untraceable founders and it&#x27;s safe for big players like FileCoin that voluntarily comply with the securities laws. But if you&#x27;re a well-meaning techie with no legal team, you may be easily breaking dozens of security-related regulations without even realizing it.

Not sure what to think of this. Smells like FOMO. I looked at their roadmap and they&#x27;re planning to support so many different architectures. Adding EVM support seems like adding more complexity to the project just because blockchain.<p>I think something like this is needed for programming on blockchain, but I&#x27;d prefer to see a dedicated project instead.

“but after studying many other ICO, I am convinced now that this is not just a short-lived fad, but a real new model to fund projects, and especially open-source projects related to blockchains.”<p>There’s been quite a few of us suggesting people jump into blockchain just to get funding for more important stuff (e.g. language-level tooling or libraries) they’ll produce as part of the coin offering they sell to investors. Plus, with the focus on correctness, it’s easier than ever to get the private sector to invest in high-assurance tooling. Problem is they keep trying to clean-slate everything when there&#x27;s piles of work to build on with better benefits in the long term. And this work is <i>hard</i> even when doing simple things if you want end result to be widely usable. So, you better have a good justification for trying to redo decades worth of hard work on your own with some VC funding.<p>Anyone wanting a shortcut should build your language on top of capabilities of the SPARK Ada language [1] with this book [2]. Your smart contracts get all the benefits it currently offers plus whatever extra you build plus whatever they build with the influx of money for Pro edition. Recent projects already add some pointer [3] and floating-point [4] safety to what they already mostly automate with that tooling. This is also a mature tool whose development and commercial use goes back decades [5].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SPARK_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;SPARK_(programming_language)</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Building-High-Integrity-Applications-SPARK&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1107040736" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Building-High-Integrity-Applications-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1710.07047" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1710.07047</a><p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.forge.open-do.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;spark2014-discuss&#x2F;2017-November&#x2F;001446.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.forge.open-do.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;spark2014-discuss&#x2F;2...</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spark-2014.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;itp_2014_r610.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spark-2014.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;itp_2014_r610.pdf</a>

Not sure why people are so skeptical. I&#x27;m hoping for ICO to become a successful model for open source projects. Maybe more projects will be able to sustain themselves with ICOs, Patreon, donations.

I was pretty sure it was going to be a joke, but like the Long Blockchain Company announcement[1], it&#x27;s pretty apparent that its real. Good god.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;investing&#x2F;long-island-iced-tea-bitcoin-blockchain&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;investing&#x2F;long-island-iced-t...</a>

Exciting stuff. Just a heads up that NEO is being marketed as a decentralized platform but its roadmap describes a platform run by Trusted Third Parties, which have to be approved by NEO after proving their identity and proving they have a legal entity backing them.<p>The NEO team also promotes itself as compliant with regulations (probably to stay on the good side of the authorities in China where it is based). If they want to go down this route, that&#x27;s their prerogative, but it&#x27;s downright misleading to describe it as decentralized or even as in the same space as cryptocurrency. It&#x27;s more like a traditional Fintech company, with greater separation of concerns between users and trusted third parties (e.g. updates to the database are cryptographically validated, with each user controlling their own private keys to authorize updates to their respective account), to provide more transparency and security than closed database models.<p>I would add Ripple, Stellar and EOS to this class of pseudo-cryptocurrency platforms, that while arguably offering interesting innovations on the centralized server-client architecture, are exploiting the hype around decentralization to raise funds and users for platforms that are not decentralized.<p>Its centralized consensus model means NEO can afford to place very high resource loads on its nodes (or really, servers), and use traditional programming languages that are not optimized for the decentralized world. This ability to use Java, C# and Python to write programs for it is actually one of its features that is marketed on its website.

I was actually looking at Red in consideration for my next year&#x27;s personal projects.<p>I&#x27;d consider it further if I felt it was more complete. Perhaps this is a cursory evaluation, but it feels like the emphasis is to use what&#x27;s built in as much as possible. Given a lack of json (yes, there is an implementation out there, but not built in), and still pending linux GUI support, it still feels too unfinished for me to invest my time into.

Curious - How is Red sustained, who currently supports it? Or what does the roadmap look like for this to be a five-year sustainable project?<p>Edit: They seem to address this down in the blog post, with the creation of a RCT token. What is the incentive for a potential backer to buy this token?

I am excited. Wish they wrote more details on how to participate in ICOs as some - like me - never have.

&gt; We have produced a whitepaper earlier this year in October (co-authored by Tamas Herman and myself), to describe with more details and context what we are building. We will release it publicly in a few days.<p>Why not release them simultaneously?

Anyone found their whitepaper for ICO? Looks pretty interesting to me.

What has been the most successful use of smart contracts so far?

I was hoping the Red project would announce something interesting at the end of the year; but not something as interesting as this.

Do they have a plan for staying on the windy side of the SEC, or should US residents stay away?

This reads like an Aprils Fools joke.

God! Enough! At this point any announcement with &quot;blockchain&quot; should turn any informed person off of the whole project. Checking out Red was on my roadmap and now it&#x27;s firmly not.

Still waiting for Red Lobster blockchain

I just bet myself 5:95 odds (lose means donate directly to the org - they just missed out on 12.5k) that there would be only rent-seeking or “voting” in the “token use cases”. These guys don’t know what they don’t know.<p>Also, HA HA HA. I used to feel bad for the victims but now I think they deserve it.

Fantastic news !!!

Priorities. He realized that buzzwords are more important than multithreading.

Its like a traditional ICO, but the code is already written. Interesting approach