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
setgree · 2h ago
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.
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.
troyvit · 1h ago
I hear what you're saying, but as a guy who knows this much |-----| about crypto, I would be worried about the same thing using anybody else's coin. Sci-net having full control over the value of the coin means they don't have to worry as much about uncontrollable fluctuations in coin price going with an established coin, especially now that governments are getting in on the action.[1]
The whole basis of this scheme comes down to trust on so many levels. Like:
> When creating a request, you can specify the amount of tokens uploader will receive for sharing the paper. However, the tokens will not be transferred after uploading the PDF right away, but only after you check the solution and click the 'Accept' button. The tokens subtracted from your account will be added to the uploader.
So a jerk can request a paper, receive the paper, then never pay for the paper if they feel like it.
I think this is just how the community is run.
[1] I guess people could still make a run on sci-hub coins outside of this market, but I bet the scale of the coin will never reach a level that makes that tempting.
No comments yet
freeone3000 · 2h ago
Isn’t that… also good? If you want to fund the project, isn’t that a very good way to send someone(the organizers of the shitcoin) money in an efficient and untracable way? The indirect market forces avoid the downfalls of Monero (not accepted) and direct BTC transmissions (traceable), and since it’s a pre-mine, it avoids the “splash damage” of a more common commodity. Doing a sci-hub pump-and-dump is almost ideal as a fundraising vehicle for sci-hub.
aleph_minus_one · 59m ago
> If you want to fund the project, isn’t that a very good way to send someone(the organizers of the shitcoin) money in an efficient and untracable way?
The Sci-Hub meme coin does not take privacy and untraceability very seriously, thus potentially putting lots of its user in danger. :-(
theptip · 42m ago
Exactly. Whatever your opinions on crypto, it should not be controversial that black market transactions are a perfect fit.
beeflet · 1h ago
the traceability of bitcoin presents a problem in this situation. bitcoin isn't exactly fungible.
KingOfCoders · 2h ago
Send her money in an envelope if you want to pay her.
volemo · 1h ago
That would be actually illegal [1] while investing in her memecoin is only grey area.
[1]: Since, afaik, she lives in Russia and sending money in an envelope is made illegal by ФЗ № 176-ФЗ art. 22 p. "г".
PeterStuer · 12m ago
How would I know she could collect it?
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job.
May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.
troyvit · 1h ago
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.
alxfoster · 1h ago
IMHO, Monero checks every box. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as most think. Monero may be a little more difficult to exchange but last I checked, most major exchanges outside of Coinbase still support it.
bawolff · 1h ago
> 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.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 59m ago
>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 the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
beeflet · 31m ago
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.
tux3 · 2h ago
It has already been tried without a reward, there are dedicated channels where you can go to request or fulfill requests (e.g. Nexus has these).
But it's a bit of an endless chore for a person to do, there are always more requests coming. It helps one person, but it doesn't really feel like efficient use of your time when it's a drop in the ocean.
I'm not thrilled with the crypto token thing, but it's good to see new things being tried. The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, there's not much to fear from this particular initiative. The worst they can do if it turns bad is... publish scientific articles.
A_Duck · 2h ago
Fair enough — didn't realise it had already been tried and it wasn't working without reward. That's not mentioned in the article but does make sense.
There's still a good argument for sci-hub to stay fully non-commercial. Let's see where it goes.
It's not clear if Sci-Hub themselves stand to make any money from this. If they do, the worst that can happen is that their incentives are distorted from being a highly-regarded community resource to maximising the number of manual uploads.
logifail · 53m ago
> 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.
Medicineguy · 2h ago
Tbh, I like it!
Yes, crypto has a bad taste. But from my pov, the research paper situation is so broken, that anything that improves upon the status quo is highly welcomed.
But I'm with you with the penalties. Maybe they can add an option to forfeit the tokens to sci-net instead.
No comments yet
alphazard · 54m ago
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.
cge · 2h ago
>I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act
It's not clear whether this is even using a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency arrangement (assuming that would actually be private). What this appears to be presenting is a system where users will be pay, and be paid, to violate copyright, in a way that may well be easily traceable and linkable to real identities, and, for US users, likely even needs to be reported on tax returns even when just paying. The 'cup of coffee' statement entirely misses the point: the nature of the process changes when payments are involved.
Added to that are statements saying that they have systems to remove watermarks and protect the identity of users. If they're envisioning this being something researchers and students contribute to, that watermark removal system is likely to fail on many occasions, and people are potentially going to get themselves severely hurt.
I often feel like academic publishing and paper availability is somewhat of a cold war between researchers and publishers, where researchers practically need to violate copyright to research effectively, while publishers can't pursue those violations too severely, or they risk researchers ostracizing them, so we end up with unspoken understandings of acceptable violations. But a system like goes entirely outside of acceptable boundaries.
If a publisher came to a university and said, hey, this researcher put up the final copy of their own paper on their personal website in violation of copyright, the university might tell the researcher to replace the copy with a manuscript one. If a publisher comes to a university (or the police) and says they can show concrete evidence that one of their students is being paid through a foreign criminal organization to knowingly violate the terms of the university's subscriptions and likely criminally violate copyright, it seems like it could have a very different outcome.
StableAlkyne · 1h ago
> publishers can't pursue those violations too severely
A decade ago the publishing system harassed a researcher because he was downloading too many papers, going after him for millions in copyright "damages," only stopping proceedings after he ended his own life.
Yes, and we still talk about him and that one case today, a decade later. It was also a case where circumstances around it (the 'breaking' into an unlocked cabinet, the 'hidden' laptop, the different university, the manifesto, and so on) all allowed the case to be presented as particularly bad by publishers and the government.
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
littlestymaar · 2h ago
> Is the incentive even necessary?
I don't know how “necessary” it is, but I strong doubt that it will be helpful at all, as the monetary incentive is a great way to attract malicious behavior (like spamming with AI-generated papers to farm rewards, or whatever works, really).
Mistletoe · 2h ago
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.
beeflet · 48m ago
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.
No comments yet
beeflet · 1h ago
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 non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
> 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)
beeflet · 22m ago
Yes, but that should be done in a way more transparent way (donations, fees, etc.) than manipulating the tokenomics of the coin out from under you.
Retr0id · 15m ago
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?
eimrine · 30m ago
Benefiting the system is way more imporltant.
eimrine · 31m ago
At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.
beeflet · 7m ago
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.
Nowadays, this would never work. Even if they couldn't hitch a ride on another cryptocurrency, they would just use PoS and with a premine it's basically classical consensus.
tokai · 2h ago
Why 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.
krastanov · 2h ago
You should have started, not ended, your post with "Anna's Archive" ;D I did not know of it, which is why I used scihub.
Maxion · 1h ago
Because I didn't know of anything better.
mdrzn · 2h ago
"On Sci-Net, you're using tokens directly to reward uploaders. Payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
Medicineguy · 2h ago
I think you right. But researchers can upload their own papers. Seem to require a paying requester and the researcher has to notice the request.
volemo · 1h ago
While I agree this is phrased in somewhat misleading way, I think by "fellow researchers" they ment "researchers like you, user, who believe and participate in liberation of science", not "the researchers, who authored the paper you're trying to pirate".
kome · 2h ago
the point is not to pay researchers (lol), but to encourage uploaders with karma points, while paying for sci-hub infrastructure...
karaterobot · 1h ago
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."
RankingMember · 1h ago
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
troyvit · 1h ago
I think that also works in the favor of Sci-hub though.
> I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription.
Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
> Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources.
The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:
I went looking for a paper for the first time in forever and thought to go to Sci-Hub and was encumbered with whatever this crypto system is, confusingly.
This process isn’t “interesting”, it’s hot bullshit confusion.
bhy · 1h ago
It require token payment for invitation codes, however the current implementation is frustrating. It generate a QR code for mobile wallet, but there's no way to pay from a browser wallet, which I suppose is more commonly used in web3.
Chinjut · 2h ago
Are these papers returned back into sci-hub? I don't quite follow why it seems like there's now two different repositories of papers.
amarcheschi · 2h ago
if i understood, it becomes part of sci hub
but i'm not sure
kome · 2h ago
yes, it's written
karaterobot · 1h ago
It seems like this coin mechanic is just for people who want to request specific articles that aren't already on Sci-hub, and those who upload requested papers. So, for everyone who doesn't want to engage with that system, there's no change, right?
I hope so, because it sounds dumb.
jarbus · 2h ago
Why not just use Anna's archive at this point?
spiderfarmer · 2h ago
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.
dns_snek · 2h ago
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.
Luc · 2h ago
Numerai? Though I'm not so sure - their coin seems to have lost a lot of dollar value since I last checked.
Even so, the AUM of the underlying hedge fund has been going up. They've stopped publishing the fund's performance, though, so it's a little unclear if the increase is due to good performance or if they've just attracted more investors.
mandmandam · 1h ago
I find Nano-gpt [0] extraordinarily useful, and a great use case for next-gen, non-scammy crypto.
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...
aleph_minus_one · 1h ago
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).
bibelo · 1h ago
same in France it seems
perihelions · 2h ago
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. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
karaterobot · 1h ago
> 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.
If its ok to bribe the president with planes, who are we to judge for science
skywalqer · 1h ago
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 figures. She believes that the foundation was politicized, tied to Russia's liberal opposition, and fit the legal definition of a "foreign agent".
> She has also done work on religion,[57] and has argued that Stalin was a god of science, and an incarnation both of the god Thoth and the Christian God.[58]
Idk but this sounds so sus that I don't believe her with anything. Arguing that Stalin was good is very similar to arguing that Hitler was.
kome · 2h ago
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.
viraptor · 2h ago
> I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen.
Yes, but living in Russia.
ekianjo · 2h ago
So is Snowden. Your point is?
tokai · 2h ago
And she's not very noble to begin with.
kome · 2h ago
She honestly made the world a better place. Having access to scientific literature no matter where I am has certainly improved my life immensely.
tokai · 2h ago
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.
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
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...
The whole basis of this scheme comes down to trust on so many levels. Like:
> When creating a request, you can specify the amount of tokens uploader will receive for sharing the paper. However, the tokens will not be transferred after uploading the PDF right away, but only after you check the solution and click the 'Accept' button. The tokens subtracted from your account will be added to the uploader.
So a jerk can request a paper, receive the paper, then never pay for the paper if they feel like it.
I think this is just how the community is run.
[1] I guess people could still make a run on sci-hub coins outside of this market, but I bet the scale of the coin will never reach a level that makes that tempting.
No comments yet
The Sci-Hub meme coin does not take privacy and untraceability very seriously, thus potentially putting lots of its user in danger. :-(
[1]: Since, afaik, she lives in Russia and sending money in an envelope is made illegal by ФЗ № 176-ФЗ art. 22 p. "г".
May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. 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.
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 the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
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.
But it's a bit of an endless chore for a person to do, there are always more requests coming. It helps one person, but it doesn't really feel like efficient use of your time when it's a drop in the ocean.
I'm not thrilled with the crypto token thing, but it's good to see new things being tried. The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, there's not much to fear from this particular initiative. The worst they can do if it turns bad is... publish scientific articles.
There's still a good argument for sci-hub to stay fully non-commercial. Let's see where it goes.
It's not clear if Sci-Hub themselves stand to make any money from this. If they do, the worst that can happen is that their incentives are distorted from being a highly-regarded community resource to maximising the number of manual uploads.
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.
Yes, crypto has a bad taste. But from my pov, the research paper situation is so broken, that anything that improves upon the status quo is highly welcomed.
But I'm with you with the penalties. Maybe they can add an option to forfeit the tokens to sci-net instead.
No comments yet
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.
It's not clear whether this is even using a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency arrangement (assuming that would actually be private). What this appears to be presenting is a system where users will be pay, and be paid, to violate copyright, in a way that may well be easily traceable and linkable to real identities, and, for US users, likely even needs to be reported on tax returns even when just paying. The 'cup of coffee' statement entirely misses the point: the nature of the process changes when payments are involved.
Added to that are statements saying that they have systems to remove watermarks and protect the identity of users. If they're envisioning this being something researchers and students contribute to, that watermark removal system is likely to fail on many occasions, and people are potentially going to get themselves severely hurt.
I often feel like academic publishing and paper availability is somewhat of a cold war between researchers and publishers, where researchers practically need to violate copyright to research effectively, while publishers can't pursue those violations too severely, or they risk researchers ostracizing them, so we end up with unspoken understandings of acceptable violations. But a system like goes entirely outside of acceptable boundaries.
If a publisher came to a university and said, hey, this researcher put up the final copy of their own paper on their personal website in violation of copyright, the university might tell the researcher to replace the copy with a manuscript one. If a publisher comes to a university (or the police) and says they can show concrete evidence that one of their students is being paid through a foreign criminal organization to knowingly violate the terms of the university's subscriptions and likely criminally violate copyright, it seems like it could have a very different outcome.
A decade ago the publishing system harassed a researcher because he was downloading too many papers, going after him for millions in copyright "damages," only stopping proceedings after he ended his own life.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
I don't know how “necessary” it is, but I strong doubt that it will be helpful at all, as the monetary incentive is a great way to attract malicious behavior (like spamming with AI-generated papers to farm rewards, or whatever works, really).
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.
No comments yet
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
"Interesting"
https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif
Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)
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.
Nowadays, this would never work. Even if they couldn't hitch a ride on another cryptocurrency, they would just use PoS and with a premine it's basically classical consensus.
I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
> I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription.
Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:
> https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-...
This is actually the reason for the huge increase of the number of requests as the article explicitly admits:
> "The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused."
> https://sci-hub.se/sci-net
I went looking for a paper for the first time in forever and thought to go to Sci-Hub and was encumbered with whatever this crypto system is, confusingly.
This process isn’t “interesting”, it’s hot bullshit confusion.
but i'm not sure
I hope so, because it sounds dumb.
https://numer.ai/
0 - https://nano-gpt.com/conversation/new
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. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
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.
That's what redirects are for!
> 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 figures. She believes that the foundation was politicized, tied to Russia's liberal opposition, and fit the legal definition of a "foreign agent".
> She has also done work on religion,[57] and has argued that Stalin was a god of science, and an incarnation both of the god Thoth and the Christian God.[58]
Idk but this sounds so sus that I don't believe her with anything. Arguing that Stalin was good is very similar to arguing that Hitler was.
Yes, but living in Russia.