SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

a site doesn't have to justify its existence by being an alternative to anything.

Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc.

To be honest, this is a bit too late i think.

I knew a company from the UK who sold dropshiping websites, then rug-pull ready tokens (+ website), both hosted on sourcehut (with the "critical code" sold with the support). They sold everything six month ago? Solid devs, but the moral wasn't quite there. At least they made really big bucks while it lasted.

The announcement says:

> These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found...

While presumably you're not kicking people out because they disagree with you on this political question, your motivation for kicking them out is deeply political. You're practicing a "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" approach to cryptocurrency projects, based on a flawed analysis of how those projects affect the structure of the global economic system — an analysis also reflected in your lack of understanding of how dramatically "piracy," largely funded through Bitcoin, has reduced barriers to access to knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33404025.

If you want to understand how cryptocurrencies affect people suffering from economic hardship and global wealth inequality, read my post from last year on the topic, based on direct personal experience, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.

The distinction you're drawing between being in favor of cryptocurrency and publishing code that implements cryptocurrency seems to suggest that you don't believe code is speech, because its distribution should be limited in ways that other kinds of speech are not. In turn, people who believe code is speech should be wary of using your service.

More generally, I don't think people who are setting up a software project to do good for the world should have to worry about the level of geopolitical savvy of their project hosting service. If the project hosting service misunderstands some aspect of development economics — maybe they're in favor of import-substitution industrialization or organic farming, and the project is instead supporting export-focused industrialization or industrial fertilizer production — its users shouldn't get their namespace revoked and perhaps then taken over by their political opposition. Not even if they're wrong.

It's a political fact that rich people in Holland only hear about Indonesian Nike factory conditions when they are terrible; they are consequently not in a good position to judge the balance of harms and benefits. Certainly the factory workers are being "taken advantage of" in a way which is possible because they are "suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality" — but in fact export-focused industrialization has lifted billions of people out of poverty in the last three decades despite the harms it has caused, harms measured in lost eyes and hands rather than just money. (The case against organic farming is much less clear — but still something that should be resolved by the people involved, not overseas infrastructure providers acting on a incomplete understanding founded in political agitprop.)

It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem to agree with your statement that there are few legitimate use-cases.