
Write your next Ethereum contract in Pyramid Scheme - MichaelBurge
http://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ethereum-contract-in-pyramid-scheme.html
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zellyn
Oh well done. Taking the pun and then actually implementing it fully, for the
win.

> Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket.

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empath75
This is perfect. What would actually be perfect is if it replaced solidity.

~~~
jtms
don't worry, Cardano is going to eat Ethereum's lunch and it most definitely
will not be using solidity.

~~~
aesthethiccs
How can you be so sure cardano will eat ethereums lunch when the concentration
of developers in eth > cardano ?

I can see the benefits of cardano but I don't think it can catch up ?

~~~
hesdeadjim
How about a single large scale smart contract launch that doesn’t end up
needing a hard fork or result in people having money permanently frozen?

I hold ETH and I am excited for what it could do. But Solidity is hot garbage
and that Python inspired alternative is a close second. I also don’t care
about quantity of developers. These things deal with real money from real
people, it demands a level of seriousness an average developer should run
screaming from.

~~~
whataretensors
And PHP powers some of the largest sites on the web. Solidity will work for
most people who just copy a boilerplate smart contract.

~~~
hesdeadjim
You don’t see people losing millions of dollars when a webpage fails to load
due to a simple logic error.

~~~
KomradeKeeks
Webpages don't store money in the form of digital tokens that move in
accordance to the webpage's logic.

~~~
derefr
Online gambling webpages do.

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UncleEntity
> Formal Verification: Get an absolute 100% guarantee that your contracts are
> free of errors

Seems to me that should be priority #1 considering there's potentially
millions of $local_currency riding on these contracts and they seem to be done
with the hard forks when one goes awry (though I was reading that they collude
to make it really, really hard to sell off the ill gotten gains).

~~~
emmab
> Formal Verification: Get an absolute 100% guarantee that your contracts are
> free of errors

This is not actually possible, there could have been an issue with your threat
model. e.g. side-channel attacks could be out of scope.

~~~
bpicolo
Formal verification only ever verifies as far as your spec specifies

~~~
mannykannot
That is true, but it should not be assumed that a spec. is a thing of fixed
validity. A formal spec. has a reasonable likelihood of being less ambiguous,
incomplete or self-contradictory than an informal one, or whatever substitutes
for a spec. in an agile approach.

~~~
masklinn
That only tells me a spec and its formal verification are necessary but not
sufficient assets. Not "we can't prove everything so we'll keep our millions
riding on half-assed piles of garbage.

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stuaxo
Was this done purely for the joke of writing Pyramid-Scheme next to Ethereum ?

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baby
why would someone write Scheme not as a joke?

wait do the downvotes mean that some people actually use Scheme?

~~~
danblick
Scheme is a wonderful and flexible language. There's a reason it was used as a
teaching language and in books like SICP. I don't use it very much, but you
really have to admire some of the power in the language, like the way variable
binding is handled to make macros so powerful. In short: scheme is probably
one of the best base languages for building DSLs. If I had to pick "most
tasteful" programming languages I would put scheme in the top 3. (Above
Python, which is the language I use the most, and above C++ and Java which are
other languages I use at work.)

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phyller
"Destabilizing Nation-states with Math", ha, one of the most insightful
summaries of cryptocurrencies I have seen.

~~~
ktta
Huh. Looks like it can be applied to a bunch of other innovations too.

"Destabilizing Nation-states with Biology" \- Bio weapins

"Destabilizing Nation-states with Nuclear Physics" \- N-bomb

~~~
bufferoverflow
Those were state controlled. The scary thing is, we're quickly approaching the
time when bioweapons can be made cheaply and by non-biologists.

~~~
derefr
Nuclear weapons could have ended up made by non-state actors (e.g. the average
corporation) cheaply enough for a long time now; the state(s) just made sure
to get an early lock on publications about uranium enrichment processes,
before any of the really good ones became public knowledge.

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mark_l_watson
Nice article and project.

I have been experimenting with Pact that is written in Haskell and implements
a non Turing complete Lisp language for writing contracts and provides a
blockchain implementation. [https://github.com/kadena-
io/pact](https://github.com/kadena-io/pact)

------
JulianMorrison
What is the shortest compiling deployable ETH pyramid scheme you can write in
Pyramid Scheme?

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xrd
A shoo in for the Oscars in 2017. Amazing title and article.

~~~
philipwhiuk
It's 'shoe in' by the way.

~~~
xnxn
[http://grammarist.com/spelling/shoo-in/](http://grammarist.com/spelling/shoo-
in/)

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dontpanicburns
This is a lesson in follow through in pun economics. Well done

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jakoblorz
Did you first implemented this project and then realized the hilarious naming?
Or was it the other way around?

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vog
_> Haskell programmers often code in ivory towers with their heads in the
cloud. In this multi-part article series, we’ll get our feet wet diving deep
below C level._

I'm a bit confused by this article's introduction. Pyramid Scheme is a Scheme
dialect implemented in another Scheme (RAcket). What does the whole thing have
to do with Haskell?

~~~
hood_syntax
The guy who wrote the article programs in Haskell, he might assume the
audience is in on the joke

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wolfgke
Headlines coming next week on HN: "Write your next Ethereum contract in
[Forth|Elixir|Rust|Brainfuck]".

Headlines coming next month on HN: "How I wrote an Ethereum clone in
[Rust|Node.JS|Minecraft|Dwarf Fortress]".

Headline coming next year on HN: "Running the Linux kernel as a blockchain
application".

~~~
codyb
I think you may have missed the joke here. A pyramid scheme is an
unsustainable business model where the gains accrue at the top. The fact the
author built it in racket (a racket being another dishonest scheme) makes it
all the funnier.

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calebm
Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/410/](https://xkcd.com/410/)

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zerostar07
unbelievable people! next thing they will try to sell us hot ether

