Red Lang goes blockchain

I know we'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:

Some of the target usages for the token holders, will include:

- voting rights: influence the Red roadmap, vote for features and issue tickets.

- tipping: useful chat posts, code contributions, learning materials providers, etc.

- intra-community cryptoeconomics (or rather tokenomics): selling/buying services from other community members (coding tasks, consulting, learning help, bug fixing, decentralized gaming, etc.)

- paid Dapps, or in-app purchases.

In addition to that, the foundation will hold a significant amount of RCT, which will be used for rewarding:

- code contributions

- Red-related online learning or presenting materials (blog, documentations, etc.)

- promotional actions (presenting Red at a conference)

- any other actions that will help spread Red and make the community grow up.

I'm not sure I personally agree with turning the org into a "dapp", unless language-design remains with the core designers of the language and doesn't become influenced by decentralized decisions. edit: It looks like "voting rights" may actually impact this

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.

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's piles of work to build on with better benefits in the long term. And this work is hard 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.

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications-...

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07047

[4] http://lists.forge.open-do.org/pipermail/spark2014-discuss/2...

[5] http://www.spark-2014.org/uploads/itp_2014_r610.pdf

Why not release them simultaneously?