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Re: Sci-Net

#71

Post by alphazard »

A_Duck wrote: post #2

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

Economics always matter. All we have is our time, and if you want people to do things or act in a certain way or otherwise use their time in a way that benefits others or you, then you need to align their incentives.

For small/upstart projects, cryptocurrency is the best way to create economic incentives at the present moment. And you can blame regulations and poor financial infrastructure for that.

Re: Sci-Net

#72

Post by logifail »

A_Duck wrote: post #2

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

> if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward

I have two published papers from way back when, and thanks to the glorious broken incentives of academic publishing, I'm not even allowed to distribute my own work legally.

Most (even ex-)academics hate this crazy system with a passion, I know I do.

There's no need incentivise people to share academic papers, most people with access are only too ready to do so.

Re: Sci-Net

#73

Post by beeflet »

Mistletoe wrote: post #37
A_Duck wrote: post #2

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

Crypto is money in the future. You may as well have asked why must money infect everything that is good. Money is condensed time, the most valuable commodity in the universe.

A lot of bitcoiners like to fool themselves into thinking that bitcoin is some form of energy. That's not the case: you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy.

In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time.

The most valuable thing in the world is actual time. Money is just a poor man's substitute.

Re: Sci-Net

#74

Post by beeflet »

tough wrote: post #62
tokai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that isn't true. But her as a person is not who I would want in charge of this "movement". Luckily sci-hub is not the leading source of free scientific articles anymore.

what's the leading source nowadays?

anna's archive, one would assume.

Re: Sci-Net

#75

Post by theptip »

setgree wrote: post #27
A_Duck wrote: post #2

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

If there was every a ready-made use case for crypto, it's this. Alexandra Elbakyan is both a criminal in most places and a hero to many [0]. I want her to keep doing what she's doing, and that means someone probably has to pay her to do it. The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...

Exactly. Whatever your opinions on crypto, it should not be controversial that black market transactions are a perfect fit.

Re: Sci-Net

#76

Post by tokai »

tough wrote: post #62
tokai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that isn't true. But her as a person is not who I would want in charge of this "movement". Luckily sci-hub is not the leading source of free scientific articles anymore.

what's the leading source nowadays?

Anna's Archive

Re: Sci-Net

#77

Post by Retr0id »

beeflet wrote: post #66

This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it. > The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a n…

> designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator

Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)

Re: Sci-Net

#78

Post by [deleted] »

beeflet wrote: post #73
Mistletoe wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is money in the future. You may as well have asked why must money infect everything that is good. Money is condensed time, the most valuable commodity in the universe.

A lot of bitcoiners like to fool themselves into thinking that bitcoin is some form of energy. That's not the case: you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy. In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. The most valuable thing in the world is actual time. Money is just a poor man's substitute.

[deleted]

Re: Sci-Net

#79

Post by beeflet »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #69
bawolff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen. If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing. Hence seems like the right tool for the job.

>If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide…

payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network.

The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.

You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.

Re: Sci-Net

#80

Post by eimrine »

beeflet wrote: post #66

This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it. > The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a n…

At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.
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