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121–130 of 130 posts

Re: Sci-Net

#121

Are 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.

Probably only stable coins (which don’t afford speculation on their tokens).

Re: Sci-Net

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I'm responding to someone who said one of the purposes of the coin was to make money to pay for infrastructure, which the article specifically says is not true. 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 i…

It's not really an accusation, just a correction that the SciNet team will likely be making a lot of money even if they don't take a cut of the individual transactions. I think their mission should get appropriate funding so I'm not opposed to the idea as long as it doesn't just end up being a "get rich quick" scheme exploiting the SciHub brand.

I am skeptical of the last part, given the legality issues involved and relatively high risk of prosecution for prolific uploaders (think of Aaron Swartz), it makes very little sense to use a traceable blockchain like Solana for this use case. This system should really be based around an established cryptocurrency that assures anonymity like Monero.

> Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?

As far as I'm aware that's how most tokens on Solana work. The entire token supply is created by the project owner and they decide how it gets distributed, and they usually retain a significant portion of the supply to sell in the future when a market has been established and their "monopoly money" is worth something.

You can see this if you click on various tokens at [1] and look at the "Holders" tab. There's usually a single address that owns 20-60% of the total supply, sometimes more.

[1] https://solscan.io/leaderboard/token

Re: Sci-Net

#123
post #85
post #80

Earlier 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.…

I think that just another Dogecoin with premine will inevitably face the 51% attack, but a really fare cryptocurency with a big goal will attract not only attackers but a fare people. I remember how many serious people were making some bald statements to crack ETC and somehow there were more honest H/s than attacker's ones.

Re: Sci-Net

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's really beside the point here, from GP:

> As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo.

Their belief is that a project is more likely to fail because it's associated with cryptocurrency. You can challenge that belief by asking yourself whether Sci-Net would be more or less likely to fail if it tried to accept cards or Paypal instead.

Re: Sci-Net

#125
post #87
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the taxation vs inflation point you made in an earlier edit of this comment was a good one, did something make you change your mind to remove it?

No, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this: "In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying…

I suppose in this case the questionable legality makes it a bit harder to publicly fund...

Re: Sci-Net

#126
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) If her support for Stalin and Russkiy Mir in general is parody, she fooled me. Elbakyan comes across as ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag, but that doesn't mean she isn't doing awesome, vital work.

(Read until the end, I'm merely commenting on the Stalin God thing, I do agree some things are weird). I just read it, and the excerpts, the random images she chooses to include in it, the straightfaced giant leaps in logic (Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge, the Christian god came from the Middle East, therefore they -- and Stalin -- are one and the same), all reek of something that could have been posted in S…

Having heard her before, I can assure you she's not sarcastic. This completely fits her character of a pure, devoted paladin of a totalitarian imperialistic communist (heh...) religion of her own making, with a bizarrely self-contradicting pantheon in her head. Putting it bluntly, she's batshit insane. Which is probably the only kind of person that can be good at this sort of work.

Re: Sci-Net

#127

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…

She's Kazakh and lives in Kazachstan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

[flagged]

Re: Sci-Net

#128
post #39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since 2011, she has been living in Russia.[10][11][12][13]

Yeah, hard to dispute an auto-biography! Not actually a PDF but guess she didn't want to break the link: https://sci-hub.st/alexandra/bio.pdf

Thanks! I stand correct.

Re: Sci-Net

#129
post #25

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…

If "guilty by association" is to be applied evenly, we should do the same for genocidal countries like Israel, but that would be absurd. Also, I'm not sure, but I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen.

> but that would be absurd. Would it? I think the case for Israel is stronger than for Russia, even. Not saying you're wrong in principle, but this doesn't seem like a strong argument to me.

Re: Sci-Net

#130

Almost unrelated, but this is one of the domains that just show up as "Server Not Found" by default to users in Germany. It's getting blocked by ISPs on the domain level after a "voluntary agreement" with copyright holders: https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-reinforces-paywall-with-s...

Learn to setup your own DNS resolving infrastructure (or, if you need an ad-hoc solution immediately, learn how to use a different DNS resolver).

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