91–100 of 130 posts
It's nexus and telegram bots these days. Don't fall for sci net.
Anna's archive is my go-to these days.
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the point is not to pay researchers (lol), but to encourage uploaders with karma points, while paying for sci-hub infrastructure...
They make it very clear they aren't taking a cut. The quote in the linked page is "payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
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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.
> you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...). > In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. Partially, you can: - Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself - Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job - Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a fe…
This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else?
The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable.
Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things.
Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns.
I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
Hold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin? Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war. edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Mode…
Wikipedia: > Elbakyan was in conflict with the liberal, pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community.[8] According to her interview, she was attacked on the Internet by 'science popularizers' who supported liberal views that led to the shutdown of Sci-Hub in Russia in 2017 for a few days.[59] In particular, Elbakyan was strongly critical of the former Dynasty Foundation (shut down in 2015) and its associated…
I took the time to follow the link and read her very short essay on Stalin the God and it's very clearly parody and an attempt at absurdist humor. Russians and Kazakhs can do dry/straightfaced humor as well as the Brits.
Misrepresenting the essay as her honest beliefs is like arguing Monty Python really cannot tell a dead parrot from a live one.
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She honestly made the world a better place. Having access to scientific literature no matter where I am has certainly improved my life immensely.
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.
Why not? She seems to have done a great job.
Hold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin? Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war. edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Mode…
> I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. It really seems like you are though. The linked page says the transaction is between the article requester and the article contributor, and that she's not taking any money, even to support the platform. So, it seems like you're saying she's lying about that.
Russia is not a free country where you can, just, idealistically handle large amounts of cryptocurrency as you please. It's literally a mafia state! They take what they want! Foreign currency, and in particular cryptocurrency, is a priority for that war regime right now. Huge targets on the backs of anyone associated with things like this.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate... ("Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile (nytimes.com)" (2014))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868
> "When a SWAT team appeared at Pavel Durov’s door in St. Petersburg, he started thinking about his future in Russia."
> "He was home alone, and he peered at them through a monitor."
> "“They had guns and they looked very serious,” said Mr. Durov, once Russia’s biggest celebrity entrepreneur. “They seemed to want to break the door.”"
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>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 bett…
I don't know that it's a divisibility problem in general... I would say that the USD conversion ratio is instead just insane. If it had kept to something reasonable in that regard, then divisibility wouldn't be an issue. It's something like 1 millionth of a bitcoin, more than enough. When I looked it up just before posting, I thought "I'll have to delete this comment before I finish writing it out, because you can still send small enough dollar amounts". And it kind of does work, the only thing I know of that's marked in tenths of a cent is gasoline. But the transaction fees are just absurd. $1 per just isn't low enough for anything smaller than buying a new car. If it is truly meant to be a currency, then I should be able to buy anything I can buy with the dollar at any retail store. Without thinking "Hey I need to buy more stuff so my transaction fee isn't wasted."
I wish bitcoin could've worked. But not only did it flunk out hard, it's just sucking up all the air out of the room so that newer, better solutions could get a foothold. If I was only a little more paranoid, I'd see conspiracy in all of this.
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They make it very clear they aren't taking a cut. The quote in the linked page is "payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
They don't need to take a cut of the transaction because they'll effectively own a significant part of the token supply. They make their "cut" whenever someone buys their tokens.
It sounds like you're making a separate accusation, which I have no opinion about. There's nothing in that statement about them owning a significant part of the token supply, though it may be true for all I know. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
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Anna's Archive
Doesn't Anna's Archive have Sci-Hub as one of its main sources? If so, claiming it's lucky this is an alternative to Sci-Hub doesn't make a lot of sense.