Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen. Yes, but living in Russia.
So is Snowden. Your point is?
If Snowden suddenly launched a cryptocurrency now the same skepticism would be prudent.
Sci-Net
101–110 of 130 posts
Re: Sci-Net
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They use the sci-hub dump yes. But sci-hub isn't providing new articles so nothing new is sourced from sci-hub.
Re: Sci-Net
#103Are there any successful crypto adjacent projects that do well outside the crypto-sphere? As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo. But maybe I'm biased.
Saying that most crypto projects end up failing is about as interesting as saying that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The vast majority of projects fail in general.
Yet it's obvious why it's stupid to say that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The majority of projects fail, but we see successful projects all around us. I don't see any related to cryptocurrency. In fact, I've only ever seen them adopted as speculative investments.
Re: Sci-Net
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. 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…
here's your conspiracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
take it with a grain of salt.
Re: Sci-Net
#105Why 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
I am a major hater of many (most?) crypto applications, which should tell you something since the idea of a decentralized currency outside state control is one that deeply appeals to my principles.
But this is one of the better applications I've seen. Running centralized infra for this specific case is extremely difficult and, generally speaking, it makes sense to give people the option to express to willingness to pay for what's essentially a priority request.
This isn't pay-for-access, it's "I'll offer some reward for you to get the paper now, after which it is still accessible to everyone."
My big quibble is with the implementation: there really doesn't need to be a sci-hub memecoin. Monero is purpose-built for this sort of thing. Use Monero (or zcash, I suppose.) Easy litmus test: if a DNM opened up that only supported transactions in its own "memecoin", how many people would take it seriously? Zero.
Re: Sci-Net
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I would love to hear from people who know what _would_ be a better coin to use than a) Bitcoin and b) your own meme-coin.
I agree about Monero, it's anonymous, fungible, and has low fees and high speed.
It only has low fees because nobody uses it. The same thing happens to Bitcoin. Someone said the transaction fee is about $0.10 right now (I didn't check) but when people are actually using Bitcoin, that jumps up to around $20.
Re: Sci-Net
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.
The new trend of starting a "token" on top of some PoS cryptocurrency greatly saddens me. Back in the old days, you would have to actually start your own cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin) every time you wanted to sell some worthless token. Not only did this result in more technical diversity of cryptocurrencies, but if you got enough people together you could do a 51% attack and take malicious projects off the network.…
Special-purpose tokens are perfectly fine, and in fact, are what you should do whenever you want to represent something specific. You can make a token that represents an article request, or a bond, or a share of an investment fund, or anything else, and then someone can trade a certain number of them. Also, the market can figure out how much one of them is worth. It might even be more stable than the base token, as in the case of DAI (an decentralized stablecoin on the Ethereum chain).
Re: Sci-Net
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Even if crypto is the only viable way to do this, doing it with their own memecoin instead of something that's already well established is a massive red flag. That means they can easily pre-mine vast amounts of their token for effectively nothing and then cash out by selling them all at once when the price peaks. Textbook shitcoin rug-pull.
>doing it with their own memecoin instead of something that's already well established is a massive red flag.
It is. You want to reward people for their work in a private and reliable way? Monero's right there.
Re: Sci-Net
#109Why not just use Anna's archive at this point?
It's better to have redundancy with these things. I would rather see both Anna's archive and SciHub stay operational.
Re: Sci-Net
#110Why even use sci-hub anymore? With the lack of updates, instability over petty stuff like naming a wasp after the founder, etc. I don't see why anyone would use sci-hub over Anna's Archive.
In case Anna's archive goes down, plenty of people will be glad that SciHub exists. And vice versa, of course.