SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed • Hacker News Board

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#131

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

tossl568 wrote: post #124

woodruffw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, quantity: video games don’t use as much electricity, and those that do aren’t incentivizing reactivation of old fossil fuel plants. For another, necessity: we have a preexisting financial system that secures orders of magnitude more value than cryptocurrencies do, with actual legal guarantees and recourses. For a final, civic harm: whatever limited negative social ills can be explained by video games are dwa…

Energy isn't fungible. That financial system uses many more magnitudes of energy. This is like blaming dollars for the existence of bank robbers.

I don’t understand what energy’s fungibility has to do with anything I’ve said. Most economic uses of energy involve exchanging it for productive capacity or consumer demand. Bitcoin definitely is an economic use of energy, just not a good or desirable one.

I don’t think the directly comparable elements of the financial system (i.e., storage and settlement) use anywhere near as much power as Bitcoin does. Unless you’re doing that thing where you’re comparing the entire traditional economy to Bitcoin, which is silly: the traditional economy has actually valuable outflows, and Bitcoin does not replace factories and their workers.

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#132

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

tossl568 wrote: post #114

arghwhat wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and thereby those that cause them to keep running (e.g., Bitcoin miners). If we had abundant clean energy everywhere with no unclean power plants, then knock yourself dead. But right now, any power consumed has an unclean component. Even if you use power in a country that is 100% renewable, it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy. And that these miners buy old crap power pla…

Nope. Energy isn't fungible.

Nothing the GP has said requires a stance on the fungible nature of energy. Where are you getting that from?

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#133

Post by tossl568 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

envolt wrote: post #130

Never read a better summary before - > 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; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as r…

A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people.

So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn't true.

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#134

Post by tossl568 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #132

tossl568 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Energy isn't fungible.

Nothing the GP has said requires a stance on the fungible nature of energy. Where are you getting that from?

"it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy."

This idea/delusion that energy that is used for mining should and could have been used for something else. It's just not the case.

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#135

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

tossl568 wrote: post #134

woodruffw wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing the GP has said requires a stance on the fungible nature of energy. Where are you getting that from?

"it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy." This idea/delusion that energy that is used for mining should and could have been used for something else. It's just not the case.

You shouldn’t refer to other commenters as deluded.

It’s pretty clear the GP means a demand curve: cryptocurrencies induce demand for energy sources that would otherwise be uneconomical to operate. This doesn’t require fungibility.

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#136

Post by mwcampbell » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #116

junofan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a political statement. I don’t think declaring “inaction is political” makes it so. Sounds like sloganeering.

Inaction is a political position in support of the status quo. It is the equivalent of saying "I am fine with this".

I disagree with this. Inaction is merely an acknowledgement that we can't be informed, effective activists on everything. I'm pretty much disengaged from political activism these days, because I don't want to be manipulated into joining the human equivalent of a botnet. Instead I focus on the one area (accessibility for disabled people) where I'm actually knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion, and where I can actually do something meaningful.

Edit to add: Also, accepting the status quo on some things, even if one doesn't think it's ideal, may be necessary to be maximally effective in one's primary area. So my main open-source project in the area of accessibility is maximally permissively licensed (the MIT/Apache dual license typical in the Rust community), is hosted on GitHub, and targets proprietary platforms first, because I care more about accessibility than any of these other things.

I have no problem with this specific decision though.

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#137

Post by djha-skin » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

As a paying customer, I am disenchanted. I agree with Drew's views on cryptocurrency on a personal level, but banning someone for using a technology before even knowing whether or not it's primarily being used to break the law is not what I had in mind.

Sure, ban harassment, spam, illegal activities, and abuse of platform. But this kind of banning seems more arbitrary even than GitHub's, which is sort of what I was getting away from when I went to SourceHut.

Oh, well. RocketGit[1] looks promising.

1: https://rocketgit.com/

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#138

Post by zeroclip » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #61

zeroclip wrote: post #59

Seems like virtue signalling from an over-controlling project maintainer with a grudge against blockchains. Can you make a coherent case for why a legitimate and licit application of crypto should not be allowed on your source hosting platform? To give an example of a legitimate and licit application: Endaoment.

Legitimate use-cases are not banned, per the article: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.

Seems extremely arbitrary. Would ENS get a pass? What about Ethereum itself?

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#139

Post by nurettin » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #69

A lot of the comments so far have been negative, so I’ll add a positive one: I think this was the right move, and I’m content (as an actual paying member) with it. Kudos particularly for the well-laid-out position statement. Drew and I have extensive differences in opinion when it comes to software, but his sincerity and willingness to put his money where his mouth is are apparent in cases like this.

You can cheer for your ideology, but what if your business was the one being purged because the owners profess to be the moral guardians of humanity?

Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

#140

Post by Herbstluft » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #121

vladharbuz wrote: post #73

There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree. Some things are harmful to the lives of those around us, and just as the private individual can cast a social/cultural vote against this harmful thing by refusing to engage with it and support it, a business can cast a vote in the same…

> Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view. Yeah, just like Tor, which is also heavily associated and almost exclusively used for illicit and illegal activities; especially by fraudsters, criminals, scammers, tax / sanctions evasion…

The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.

Arguments and use cases for anonymity are very easy to come up with.

Blockchain related projects cause damage on two fronts:

- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.

- The tech around blockchains (almost) qualifies as snakeoil. The use cases are nonexistent in the way they are portrayed. This perpetuates some pseudoscience equivalent in the realm of technology. Which is dangerous on its own. Blockchain is like Homeopathy.

No other use case has come up, and any blockchain related project has to simply lie from the get go to even justify its existence. (NFTs; "block chain in gaming" which is total bs from start to finish, portrayed as if they magically make assets appear in other games, which makes no sense whatsoever; block chains where they offer 0 advantages over databases, because a single company keeps ownership and administrative privilege; et cetera)