23 ms·

Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin

716 points by ur-whale 6y ago

Landmarks 6y ago
How successful has it been to switch to Bitcoin? I hear mixed things about it and wonder how many actually use this currency.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  Bitcoin isn't necessarily well aligned to what people usually think of as a "currency". It's an entirely new beast in the financial instrument space. It does bear some characteristics of traditional currencies, but not all of them. Specifically, as it works today, and until Lightning gets some traction, BTC isn't very convenient for small day to day transactions like buying a cup of coffee. On the flipside, it does have attributes that traditional currencies strictly do not have. For cases such as the OP, there is no other financial instrument on the planet that will cut it (other than things like Monero / ZCash / MimbleWimble). Besides being antifragile and censorship resistant, there is also a very strong case to be made for Bitcoin in the 'preservation of wealth' niche (if you are strongly insensitive to short-term volatility, and capable of playing on a 5 year time horizon, that is). [EDIT]: To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power.
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    There are forks of Bitcoin that solve (most of) these problems and make it more usable as an actual currency, rather than a gold-like store of value. "Bitcoin Cash" is the most famous, there are others. Frankly the failure of "original" Bitcoin to adapt to use as a currency seems to me to be a total failure of vision.
    - octocop 6y ago
      With that logic the wright brothers made a shitty airplane. Bitcoin will exist forever, it will be like the Egyptian pyramids for our ancestors.
    - ahnick 6y ago
      My understanding of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV is that they have just increased the blocksize the clients can handle. Is there something more to them than that?
      - fsckboy 6y ago
        there's also sidechains, segwit, and lightning network which shrink and consolidate transactions to increase the number of them that can fit in a block
      - SnowProblem 6y ago
        Yes. It's really worth dwelling on the long-term implications of terabyte+ sized blocks and fees of a thousand of a cent. This is where BSV is heading and everything changes at that scale. New use cases are unlocked. Old architectures need to be rethought. It's the most interesting technology I've encountered in a long time and it's a gem of entrepreneurship opportunity for those that can stomach swimming upstream.
      - zhoujianfu 6y ago
        Not really, but the result is essentially no fees. And thanks to Moore’s Law there’s no trade-off for it. Bitcoin (Core) is insane for having high fees.
    - ur-whale 6y ago
      > seems to me to be a total failure of vision. First, the market seems to strongly disagree with you [1] Second, what seems to me a total failure of vision is trying to shoehorn something as new and disruptive as Bitcoin in the old and worn out yoke of currencies as they used to exist. There's paypal for that. [1] https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/?exchange=COINBASE https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/?exchange=COINBAS... (choose the 5 yr. view)
  - mirimir 6y ago
    > To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power. Also for VPN providers, and their customers. And generally for people who want to buy stuff and lease online services ~anonymously. If one mixes well enough, that is.
    - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago
      It's not that easy to be anonymous with Bitcoin. Eventually you have to pay for Bitcoin, and that going to involve cash or trust, neither is simple.
      - lallysingh 6y ago
        Bounce through monero first.
        RandomBacon 6y ago
        Might as well just stay in Monero. If you have to pay someplace that doesn't use Monero, just use XMR.to to pay (converts Monero to Bitcoin).
      - mirimir 6y ago
        Mirimir earns his Bitcoin, so there's no cash involved. But no matter how you get the Bitcoin, you can get whatever degree of anonymity you want, by mixing it many times. You mix via Tor and nested VPN chains, with a different Whonix VM and mixing service for each mix.
      - bitcointruther 6y ago
        you can buy bitcoin KYC free on bisq.network (but there is a premium). Very low risk of loss of funds. You can even use zelle which is supported by most banks. From there, send your coins through a samouari whirlpool https://samouraiwallet.com/whirlpool https://samouraiwallet.com/whirlpool Then send them wherever you like. There is still some counterparty risk (what if you're buying coins from the CIA, or whatever), but it's almost minimal. Buying coins from a Bitcoin ATM is even easier, if there's one near you.
- jpkoning 6y ago
  As the article points out, Sci-Hub relies on bitcoin for international donations but the majority of its donations come via Yandex.Money, a Russian version of PayPal. I guess that means that most of its donations come from Russians and other CIS nationals with access to Yandex.Money.
  - mudlus 6y ago
    Some things that are good for Russia, or terrorists, are good for everyone. One of those is free and open scientific research. Bitcoin was designed for just this kind of purpose.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Why are "Russia" and "terrorists" mentioned in the same breath?
      - catalogia 6y ago
        I read that as wry.
      - lecarore 6y ago
        I think I understand the meaning of the comment (some things that are good for terrorists, like an untraceable currency or messaging app) are good for everyone. Then to be fair Russia has a very relaxed view on copyright (just having a look at VK or yandex music.. it's just full of pirated Western content) and Russian activists are often the first adopters of privacy apps. Ну да, он это не так хорошо сказал.
        metrokoi 6y ago
        It's interesting that Russia, which is seen as semi- or outright Fascist by many Americans, is much more free than the U.S. is. At least in terms of information freedom and surveillance. The further removed an individual is from the seat of world power, the less necessary it is for every aspect of their lives to be controlled.
- retube 6y ago
  "currency"
- sdinsn 6y ago
  > wonder how many actually use this currency. 100% of cyber criminals use Bitcoin, that's a lot of people!
  - foobar_ 6y ago
    100% criminals also use cash. The real problem is 0.0001% can use Bitcoin in any real sense of cash.
  - catsdanxe 6y ago
    Criminals prefer monero or another privacy coin.
    - loeg 6y ago
      As far as I can tell, criminals prefer to get paid. Bitcoin is accessible to customers.
      - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
        Customers don't want to put themselves at risk either. Most illegal activity is rapidly switching to monero as people learn that Bitcoin is easily traceable unless people take confusing and expensive countermeasures. It's not difficult to swap between different cryptocurrencies and there are major exchanges in almost all countries to directly get monero anyway
        chensformers 6y ago
        So shouldn't Monero be more popular?
        ajkdhcb2 6y ago
        Barely anyone understands this technology well, and so they listen to celebrity Bitcoiners that have a vested interest. It's also difficult to find the one good alternative project among is a sea of well-funded scams. Marketing is important. Real usage is also a niche activity compared to speculation at this stage
- Geee 6y ago
  Coinbase has 30M+ users. Extrapolating from that I'd say roughly 100M people use Bitcoin to some extent, and it's growing pretty rapidly (20% growth on /r/bitcoin subscribers this year). Using means storing or transferring value in Bitcoin.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
  Transaction fees are a real issue with Bitcoin. Most of the time, they are suitable for standard payment amounts, but they can spike to quite high levels that make only large amounts worth transacting. This is due to network capacity limitations. Furthermore, anyone that does not wish to hold BTC - understandable due to its significant volatility - must convert it again into the preferred currency. Fees = friction, and there's enough friction now that people will only use it when it provides some significant utility.
- uoylj 6y ago
  You can check it yourself: https://sci-hub.st/support https://sci-hub.st/support https://blockstream.info/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns https://blockstream.info/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9q...
LockAndLol 6y ago
Is the Sci-Hub archive available over torrent or some other P2P system? It would make it an absolute fools errand to take it down as it would keep popping back up. I don't know a single person who actually donates in bitcoin, so it's surprising to me that she managed to raise 900k in 2018. Bonkers
- catsdanxe 6y ago
  Yes there are torrents for libgen and scihub. They are not user friendly. One torrent contains hundreds of files without human identifiers. You need a copy of their database to know what the files are.
- sixtyfourbits 6y ago
  http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ It's something like 75TB last time I checked, over 82 million articles in total. Each torrent contains 100,000 articles, named by DOI. If sci-hub ever gets taken offline, there are enough full backups out there that it can be re-instated fairly quickly (at least the archive of existing articles; the credentials necessary to obtain new ones are not included in these torrents or database dumps).
cracker_jacks 6y ago
If there was ever a noble application of the decentralized, uncensorable technologies ideas bourne out of the crypto community, this would be it.
- RandomBacon 6y ago
  Bitcoin is not uncensorable. Miners have the ability to censor transactions based on the sender/receiver/amount.
  - Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    Correct, but this requires miner collusion. If just one miner says no (or isn't contactable by the colluding party) then the transaction can make it into a block. If this ever became a practical issue, which I doubt, then censored people would only need to switch to any coin that supports stealth addresses. Edit: I also suppose, the colluding miners could also try to mine a competing fork to censor a block. This would be rightfully called out as a 51% attack attempt, though.
  - xur17 6y ago
    Has there ever been a case where this occurred (with a market clearing mining fee is included)? You only need one miner to include the transaction.
    - jnwatson 6y ago
      Yes. Treasury has tried to tighten the screws somewhat. [1] *. https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-currency-addresses-first-time-releases-new-guidance/ https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-... You are correct that you only need one miner, but that miner has to win a block.
    - kolinko 6y ago
      There’s a ton, actually. Bitcoin has a system of “standard” transactions, that is the ones that are accepted by miners, vs. “valid” transactions that are accepted by nodes. Any nonstandard transaction will be rejected by 90 if not 100%, miners, but if you get lucky to get someone to mine it, it will work fine with the protocol. The nonstandard txs are any that are something more than a transfer, multisig (i.e. the ones that have some sort of smart contract capability). This is not theoretical - literally killed my project of decentralised oracles (Orisi) back in 2014. Our beta transactions were accepted only by 10% of miners, so you had to wait for hours to get your tx through. Perhaps it changed - I think in 2018 not even one mining pool accepted that, but perhaps by now they fixed it, although I doubt that. May seem like a small thing, but I met other projects that bumped into it. They had the tech, just didn’t manage to convinve miners to accept their transactions.
oli5679 6y ago
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy
kemonocode 6y ago
I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela. Yes, I know Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't being used by everyone. Yes, I'm aware of the risks and the costs. But it's still a huge boon as crypto allowed me to transact at all when it was physically unfeasible to do so. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until such reality changes: most people who disregard cryptocurrency as just a fad can afford to think that way. Their needs are served by traditional banking, and that's fine! But it's not the reality for an important amount of people who are unbanked for whatever reason: their past, their actions (whether moral things considered illegal and thus they're prosecuted, or legal things that society consider immoral and thus they're censored) or even just a geographical accident.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I think it's a reasonable solution at the margins as long as the situtation in countries like Venezuela is as bad as it is. I don't think many people dispute that. But as a solution for the institutional failures it still is not a replacement and obviously the solution in Venezuela needs to be repairing the system. Same with Sci-Hub in this case. The Bitcoin donations alleviate financial pressure somewhat, but of course the lawsuits and IP-infringement will still haunt everyone involved.
  - cinquemb 6y ago
    > I think it's a reasonable solution at the margins Reasonable solutions at the margins tend to be adapted in some major way by the masses in time, like bottleneck microstates can end up driving steady state long term behaviors of systems in glassy dynamics… technical solutions to make lawsuits and IP-infrignment have no teeth are being adopted more everyday but not as fast as some would like.
  - mariuolo 6y ago
    > the lawsuits and IP-infringement will still haunt everyone involved. I suspect donations are used mostly to keep the lights on.
  - 6y ago
trav4225 6y ago
Some relevant TLDR background from the article: "A self-described Communist in her political views, Elbakyan believes the paywall policy of science publishing is a kind of censorship."
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago
  Communist but taking donations? At least she's right on paywall publishing being total bollocks.
  - PudgePacket 6y ago
    Just because you have an ideological belief doesn't mean you're somehow magically exempt from participating in the currently capitalist world. People still need to purchase food, pay bills etc.
    - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
      > currently capitalist world Plenty of communist countries exist, today. Why not move to utopia?
Ghjklov 6y ago
>"Blackballed" Woah woah. Coindesk cancelling imminent?
- cwkoss 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackballing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackballing Etymology of blackballed is not racial, if that's what you're suggesting
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    Blacklist and whitelist are also not racial either but have been "cancelled" by some.
  - Ghjklov 6y ago
    "the black ball signifies opposition" Blacklist signifies exclusion. What makes one racist and the other not?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - throw_m239339 6y ago
    Anything can be deemed "racial" today. "blacklist" wasn't racial either until it was deemed racial by corporations like GitHub.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
Aachen 6y ago
Is this new? I've been meaning to donate but didn't want to do the whole gdpr-questionable bitcoin exchange identification thing, so only when Keybase was taken over I asked a friend to help convert those Lumens into a bitcoin donation to sci-hub. Glancing through the article, it doesn't sound like PayPal was an option for most of the last decade now? I'm also not too thrilled about supporting this super wasteful currency, a PoS or similar alternative being supported would be quite welcome.
- johnyzee 6y ago
  You can buy bitcoin at 7-11 and CVS now, with only a $5 fee: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-can-now-buy-bitcoin-at-cvs7-eleven-rite-aid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-can-...
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Melting_Harps 6y ago
> I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela. Did you see this: https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9aef0f6cb2c0464f7f0b008f918d2d72d80b262d https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=p... Despite the Maduro Regime launching Petro (State-based crytocurrency) they do not accept it for their official documents, nor do they accept Credit Cards, they do however seem to accept BTC. Which makes sense because for a time the Government thugs were raiding Bitcoin miners and taking their rigs and funds. Alexandra is a total badass, I like her defiant attitude towards Academia as a whole, and will be supporting her efforts once again this year. Free access to Scientific Journals is fundamental for a well Educated populace and should be available to all who seek the knowledge. What's even crazier is that COVID has shown us that in dire situations, the walled-garden Peer Reviewed system isn't always best: https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-journals-dont-really-do-their-job/ https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-journal... I've seen how petty the peer reviewed system is in the 'publish or die' model in the Health Sciences, its petty and pathetic to see grown men and women alike having to resort to such unscrupulous antics to keep up with the illusion that this is what serves as one of the notable metrics for tenure. As much as I like SciHub, I hope that her success is measured not by the amount of domains and servers she was able to maintain, but by her/SciHub no longer being needed as the paradigm finally shifted.
- tim333 6y ago
  Petro was a bit of a joke I think, mostly seeming to require a transfer of funds from Venzulean banks and the like to a petro fund presumably controlled by Maduro or friends and family thereof, in return for petro coins that you can't do anything much with. Credit cards are I guess blocked by US sanctions. At least bitcoin works.
stevespang 6y ago
Let me tell you all the ways I DESPISE Paypal . . .
DoctorOetker 6y ago
If an advanced alien species popped up, and were to observe humanity today, it probably would have a hard time understanding why a species would intentionally cripple its future so hard by punishing violators of copy-'right'. It would even be astonished if there weren't any copyright: it wouldn't understand why empty HDD's weren't 90% capacity preloaded with STEM materials at the manufacturing plant. The user could always format. The majority of nations are lagging in the majority of STEM subjects, why on earth don't they impose a differential STEMpty-ness tax on imported HDD's? Want to import a drive without randomized sampling of research, current and historical? pay extra to the STEM drive pot; imported a STEM drive? receive a little extra from the STEM drive pot.
- deleted 6y ago
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- metrokoi 6y ago
  I find it interesting that humans always assume alien behavior would be exactly the behavior that they believe is the best behavior for humans. We can't project our ethics on to aliens, there are an infinite number of evolutionary strategies that may develop. Aliens may view enslaving the majority of their fellow species and keeping them uneducated as ethical because it might make for a more efficient structure. More likely, all of their concepts would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to us. Anyway, putting STEM material on every computer wouldn't do anything because the barrier isn't the availability of knowledge, it's that most people aren't interested in that information. 99.9% of human knowledge is easily available online, just as easy if not easier than opening a file on a HDD. That's not to say that SciHub isn't necessary, because it is and I use it all the time.
- hedora 6y ago
  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Max Headroom, especially Season 2. Episode 13: “Lessons” The series is about a sci-fi dystopia. Unfortunately, most of their predictions have come to pass. That episode is particularly relevant. When it aired, it seemed absurd that we would cripple our future by punishing people that freely disseminated educational materials. I guess I’m old enough to play the part of the “advanced” alien species in your hypothetical.
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rglover 6y ago
I hope things like this mean Stripe will bring back Bitcoin support. I understand why they muted it at the time but it seems like high time to have their level of engineering backing something like that out in the wild. I'd love to have BTC options available. Does anybody know of any similar APIs for doing BTC payments (or accepting cards and having the funds auto-converted to BTC)?
- DethNinja 6y ago
  Well beauty of bitcoin is that you can be your own payment processor: https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/ There are other alternatives available as well. Main problem is taxes and legality though, right now it is better to sell your software with fiat money and convert it to bitcoin through personal investment, at least this way your company won’t be under legal risk due to accepting BTC.
vmception 6y ago
So although stablecoins exist which are great for predictable commerce (having a treasury of the amount value you expected), a key piece of the infrastructure is that Ethereum clients don't work over Tor. Most stablecoin activity is on the Ethereum network, and the clients have never prioritized Tor use. Ethereum also hosts privacy that all fungible assets can inherit, using Tornado.cash people can trade notes of unknown amounts, redeemable any time. Using Aztec people can make any token private, and communities can consider doing private-by-default tokens including with stablecoins if the issuer started it that way. So its not as simple as Bitcoin OR Monero. There is a looming large piece of the puzzle that simply is missing one piece - ease of use over Tor. Layer2 solutions on Ethereum also inherit privacy inadvertently, while solving scaling issues on layer1. Of course, sci-hub doesn't NEED Tor itself for donations, being fairly benign, but as soon as that piece exists, many tech savvy people simply use that route. Monero will likely remain superior but technically lesser solutions can solve the actual market needs better, since the attack surface isn't that consequential.
- mirimir 6y ago
  > ... Ethereum clients don't work over Tor. That's always bothered me. It also amazes me how much clients seem restricted to smartphones and Chrome.
- Scott_Sanderson 6y ago
  What's the relevance of whether eth clients work over Tor? A wallet's history would be available on a block explorer like etherscan.io whether the transaction had been broadcast over Tor network or not. I run a bitcoin node over Tor but it does not change how any money spent from that wallet is viewed by the network compared to spending from a non-Tor wallet.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    I wouldn't want my ISP-assigned IP address to be associated with my Monero transactions. And VPNs, even nested VPN chains, provide far less anonymity than Tor. Edit: s/Bitcoin/Monero/g
  - 6y ago
bouncycastle 6y ago
I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful. Electricity required to process a single transaction equal the consumption of 18 days for an average US household (source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption) Not only power consumption, these things generate large amounts of e-waste too, comparable to the e-waste generation of Luxemburg (source https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/) It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of its value in just a few days)
- 1ark 6y ago
  > I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful. Wasteful compared to what? > It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of its value in just a few days) It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes. After that you can move it to a stable coin if you want to be exposed to USD (or gold) instead.
  - bouncycastle 6y ago
    > Wasteful compared to what? Compared to every alternative. Look up the sources I've linked,. the amount of energy used by Bitcoin is ludacris and unsustainable. > It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes 10 minutes on average, but that's only 1 confirmation. You'll need to wait 6 before you can ship the goods. Current cost is $0.50 - so both slow and expensive. (source https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/) > After that you can move it to a stable coin There are no stable coins on bitcoin (that I'm aware of) and you can't use one nativelly. Even if there are, they are custodial risks involved plus moving requires another transaction.
    - madmaniak 6y ago
      There's no safe alternative in sources you've linked. Also traditional system has huge cost hidden in inflation. The cost of bitcoin and all these footprints is minimal - you get rid off central banks, banks, visa and others. They have the biggest buildings all around the planet filled with the most expensive workers - all the infrastructure runs on much more electricity than few households. And you compare only the payment process cost. What a luck of imagination.
hirundo 6y ago
"Alexandra Elbakyan, a 31-year-old freelance coder, neurobiologist and phylologist, is running a database of over 80 million articles from academic journals that are normally available only through subscriptions." A modern Prometheus. Some plinths have recently opened up. A statue of this woman would make a nice replacement.
- entropyneur 6y ago
  Careful there. Beside this undoubtedly noble deed she has indulged in some less than impeccable political expression. Meanwhile it looks like a holistic approach to moral evaluation of statues is gaining traction so it might end up a waste of copper.
  - new2628 6y ago
    "holistic approach to moral evaluation" I'm not holding my breath for that one.
  - hardlianotion 6y ago
    Holistic is not the term that springs to my mind.
  - Funes- 6y ago
    >less than impeccable political expression According to whom? Care to point us to some of those comments?
    - entropyneur 6y ago
      According to me :). But there are quite a few people in Russia who would agree. It's in Russian, but here we go: https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204 https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204 It might be difficult to understand what's so bad without being embedded into the Russian political context. So here's some more direct stuff from SciHub social media: https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852 https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852 - Stalin quotes https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498 https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498 - comparing Stalin to Christ
uoylj 6y ago
Haha, it's like PayPal is actively trying to make itself completely obsolete, especially when you couple it with this news: https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-venmo-to-roll-out-crypto-buying-and-selling https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-venmo-to-roll-out-crypto-buy...
Causality1 6y ago
I still don't see how anyone can claim with a straight face that taxpayer-funded research shouldn't be public domain.
hedora 6y ago
I usually don’t quote the article, but the last few paragraphs are important and easy to overlook: ——— Elbakyan says she hasn’t approached any political parties or government bodies, thinking they could pick up on the censorship argument if they were interested. She does not believe most people are interested in discussing freedom of knowledge. “There is no real community to discuss that, you hardly hear such voices. Not just in the mainstream media, but even on YouTube, for example. It all died by 2013, when Aaron Swartz died,” she said, adding that even though many people are using her website or pirate websites such as torrent trackers, few care how and why they work. “People don’t think about the [copyright] laws, about doing something about it or voting against it,” Elbakyan says. “When people reach out to me, they usually write to say ‘thank you’ or ask how to better donate.” Sci-Hub’s standoff with the publishing industry is a good fight, Carter (who is also a CoinDesk columnist) believes. “The law and morality don’t always match up, and they certainly don’t in this case,” he said, adding: “Sci-Hub has undeniably made the world a better place, and Alexandra has had to live as a pariah because of it. Funding her operations with bitcoin perfectly demonstrates its value proposition.”
- fouc 6y ago
  Is there really no community around "freedom of knowledge"? Why not? How can we make it happen?
  - john4532452 6y ago
    The internet was originally that pre 2010's
    - fouc 6y ago
      Touché, we need to bring that back.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
I've been mulling this over but why don't people who want some consistent value go with the gold-backed coins? Couldn't tell you which is the best option, but either people convert or Sci-hub could do the exchange instantly or at EoW every week or whatever to get away from the volatility but keep the improved payment. Financial markets are very volatile right now, but Gold is just about the best store of value you can have
- lifty 6y ago
  Gold backed coins, like PAX, are very easy to censor. While all the coin ownership information sits on the blockchain ledger, the gold sits somewhere in a vault and the custodian company has the capability to blacklist coins. Virtually all gold backed coins have this issues. You need a native digital token to have better censorship resistance.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    Ahh thanks -- I didn't think of the censorship angle, that's a showstopper for sure
raxxorrax 6y ago
Paypal has been quite prominent in banning people from their service. Some might deserve it perhaps but I am still against it. Paypal can never be a universal payment processor. If they banned real criminal transactions, sure, but I only have seen them ban people to enhance their image.
- berkes 6y ago
  > If they banned real criminal This too, is problematic. A private entity should never be the one deciding what is criminal and what is not. Especially if they are providing crucial infrastructure.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    True, we certainly wouldn't want payment processors to make that distinction.
  - ojnabieoot 6y ago
    This is a very stupid thing to argue and I don’t think you actually believe it. Individuals and corporations are responsible for their own activity and are responsible for determining if their own actions are illegal. Nobody is saying PayPal should be the arbiter of law and order or that PayPal is automatically liable for all actions of their users. But if PayPal believes one of their customers is using their service to finance criminal activity, they have a legal duty to respond. An extreme (but plausible) example is child abuse - if PayPal discovers one of their customers is using donations to finance child pornography, PayPal shouldn’t wait for a court order to shut it down. And if they did drag their feet then some PayPal employees need to go to jail.
    - berkes 6y ago
      In your extreme case, it is PayPals duty to inform the authorities. And then to act upon the instructions recieved from that authority. But it is not PayPals duty to decide whether the customer is a criminal or not; that is what the courts or your local version thereof, is for. It might be that in the US, this is different, but in the EU it is not. In fact, in the EU, payment providers are, in several cases, prohibited by law to shut down or inform customers. So if Paypal were to shut down the contract of such a customer, that would be thing that might bring PayPal employees to jail. Now, that is obviously aside from any EULA or other agreements PayPal has with its customers: as a private entity, paypal is free to put arbitrary rules in that contract: dissalow stuff that is otherwise perfectly legal, for example. But that is very different from becoming a judge. Edit: but my point was, that the moment PayPal becomes "critical infrastructure", such arbitrary rules are problematic because, if, say, a PayPal account is required to pay taxes or receive any form of wages, such arbitrary rules will exclude people who then might get into serious trouble. Also, please keep the conversation civil. Calling me "very stupid" does not help to bring your otherwise valid and thoughtful concerns forward.
treebornfrog 6y ago
They should be using Monero. Can't be traced by governments (1). (1). https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39 https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39
- akerro 6y ago
  This isn't about tracing or hiding source and/or destination. It's about being able to donate at all.
louwrentius 6y ago
And making the plannet a worse place in the process. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...
guico 6y ago
Poor choice of words for this title, especially right now. What about “Blocked by Paypal”?
guico 6y ago
Poor choice of words on the title. What about “Blocked by Paypal...”?
hellofunk 6y ago
PayPal is a thorn in our world. They are atrocious and I wish they'd die. The extraordinary fees they charge for currency conversion, in the form of very unfair rates, should alone be worthy of their demise, and should be criminal.
chriskanan 6y ago
Many academics use Sci-Hub now as an essential service, otherwise they cannot access academic papers unless they are on arxiv or similar sites. Many universities can't afford Elsevier or Springer-Natures prices. If a university lacks access then a graduate student would have to pay $30-100 per article. It is insane. Unfortunately open access is still not sufficient because top journals are frequently not open or researchers cannot afford the price for hybrid open/paywall journals to make their paper open access ($1000-$6000 per paper). Not a fan of Bitcoin though due to its inefficiency and environmental/energy costs. Link to Elsevier open access publishing fees: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi234qDr5_qAhUXQ80KHTigAAoQFjAJegQITxAB&usg=AOvVaw3yuBPUj7bUN8mGb1141I4W https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data...
z3rgl1ng 6y ago
From the article: Elbakyan says bitcoin only constitutes a small part of all donations. Most often, it’s the online payment service Yandex.Money that is available in Russia and nearby countries including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. However, for all the other parts of the world, crypto is the only direct way to support Sci-Hub.
stevedekorte 6y ago
Is there support for lightning? If so, I’ll donate.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

716 points by ur-whale 6y ago

How successful has it been to switch to Bitcoin? I hear mixed things about it and wonder how many actually use this currency.

ur-whale 6y ago
Bitcoin isn't necessarily well aligned to what people usually think of as a "currency". It's an entirely new beast in the financial instrument space. It does bear some characteristics of traditional currencies, but not all of them. Specifically, as it works today, and until Lightning gets some traction, BTC isn't very convenient for small day to day transactions like buying a cup of coffee. On the flipside, it does have attributes that traditional currencies strictly do not have. For cases such as the OP, there is no other financial instrument on the planet that will cut it (other than things like Monero / ZCash / MimbleWimble). Besides being antifragile and censorship resistant, there is also a very strong case to be made for Bitcoin in the 'preservation of wealth' niche (if you are strongly insensitive to short-term volatility, and capable of playing on a 5 year time horizon, that is). [EDIT]: To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power.
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  There are forks of Bitcoin that solve (most of) these problems and make it more usable as an actual currency, rather than a gold-like store of value. "Bitcoin Cash" is the most famous, there are others. Frankly the failure of "original" Bitcoin to adapt to use as a currency seems to me to be a total failure of vision.
  - octocop 6y ago
    With that logic the wright brothers made a shitty airplane. Bitcoin will exist forever, it will be like the Egyptian pyramids for our ancestors.
  - ahnick 6y ago
    My understanding of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV is that they have just increased the blocksize the clients can handle. Is there something more to them than that?
    - fsckboy 6y ago
      there's also sidechains, segwit, and lightning network which shrink and consolidate transactions to increase the number of them that can fit in a block
    - SnowProblem 6y ago
      Yes. It's really worth dwelling on the long-term implications of terabyte+ sized blocks and fees of a thousand of a cent. This is where BSV is heading and everything changes at that scale. New use cases are unlocked. Old architectures need to be rethought. It's the most interesting technology I've encountered in a long time and it's a gem of entrepreneurship opportunity for those that can stomach swimming upstream.
    - zhoujianfu 6y ago
      Not really, but the result is essentially no fees. And thanks to Moore’s Law there’s no trade-off for it. Bitcoin (Core) is insane for having high fees.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    > seems to me to be a total failure of vision. First, the market seems to strongly disagree with you [1] Second, what seems to me a total failure of vision is trying to shoehorn something as new and disruptive as Bitcoin in the old and worn out yoke of currencies as they used to exist. There's paypal for that. [1] https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/?exchange=COINBASE https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/BCHBTC/?exchange=COINBAS... (choose the 5 yr. view)
- mirimir 6y ago
  > To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking, people who try to speak truth to power. Also for VPN providers, and their customers. And generally for people who want to buy stuff and lease online services ~anonymously. If one mixes well enough, that is.
  - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 6y ago
    It's not that easy to be anonymous with Bitcoin. Eventually you have to pay for Bitcoin, and that going to involve cash or trust, neither is simple.
    - lallysingh 6y ago
      Bounce through monero first.
      - RandomBacon 6y ago
        Might as well just stay in Monero. If you have to pay someplace that doesn't use Monero, just use XMR.to to pay (converts Monero to Bitcoin).
    - mirimir 6y ago
      Mirimir earns his Bitcoin, so there's no cash involved. But no matter how you get the Bitcoin, you can get whatever degree of anonymity you want, by mixing it many times. You mix via Tor and nested VPN chains, with a different Whonix VM and mixing service for each mix.
    - bitcointruther 6y ago
      you can buy bitcoin KYC free on bisq.network (but there is a premium). Very low risk of loss of funds. You can even use zelle which is supported by most banks. From there, send your coins through a samouari whirlpool https://samouraiwallet.com/whirlpool https://samouraiwallet.com/whirlpool Then send them wherever you like. There is still some counterparty risk (what if you're buying coins from the CIA, or whatever), but it's almost minimal. Buying coins from a Bitcoin ATM is even easier, if there's one near you.
jpkoning 6y ago
As the article points out, Sci-Hub relies on bitcoin for international donations but the majority of its donations come via Yandex.Money, a Russian version of PayPal. I guess that means that most of its donations come from Russians and other CIS nationals with access to Yandex.Money.
- mudlus 6y ago
  Some things that are good for Russia, or terrorists, are good for everyone. One of those is free and open scientific research. Bitcoin was designed for just this kind of purpose.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Why are "Russia" and "terrorists" mentioned in the same breath?
    - catalogia 6y ago
      I read that as wry.
    - lecarore 6y ago
      I think I understand the meaning of the comment (some things that are good for terrorists, like an untraceable currency or messaging app) are good for everyone. Then to be fair Russia has a very relaxed view on copyright (just having a look at VK or yandex music.. it's just full of pirated Western content) and Russian activists are often the first adopters of privacy apps. Ну да, он это не так хорошо сказал.
      - metrokoi 6y ago
        It's interesting that Russia, which is seen as semi- or outright Fascist by many Americans, is much more free than the U.S. is. At least in terms of information freedom and surveillance. The further removed an individual is from the seat of world power, the less necessary it is for every aspect of their lives to be controlled.
retube 6y ago
"currency"
sdinsn 6y ago
> wonder how many actually use this currency. 100% of cyber criminals use Bitcoin, that's a lot of people!
- foobar_ 6y ago
  100% criminals also use cash. The real problem is 0.0001% can use Bitcoin in any real sense of cash.
- catsdanxe 6y ago
  Criminals prefer monero or another privacy coin.
  - loeg 6y ago
    As far as I can tell, criminals prefer to get paid. Bitcoin is accessible to customers.
    - ajkdhcb2 6y ago
      Customers don't want to put themselves at risk either. Most illegal activity is rapidly switching to monero as people learn that Bitcoin is easily traceable unless people take confusing and expensive countermeasures. It's not difficult to swap between different cryptocurrencies and there are major exchanges in almost all countries to directly get monero anyway
      - chensformers 6y ago
        So shouldn't Monero be more popular?
        ajkdhcb2 6y ago
        Barely anyone understands this technology well, and so they listen to celebrity Bitcoiners that have a vested interest. It's also difficult to find the one good alternative project among is a sea of well-funded scams. Marketing is important. Real usage is also a niche activity compared to speculation at this stage
Geee 6y ago
Coinbase has 30M+ users. Extrapolating from that I'd say roughly 100M people use Bitcoin to some extent, and it's growing pretty rapidly (20% growth on /r/bitcoin subscribers this year). Using means storing or transferring value in Bitcoin.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
Transaction fees are a real issue with Bitcoin. Most of the time, they are suitable for standard payment amounts, but they can spike to quite high levels that make only large amounts worth transacting. This is due to network capacity limitations. Furthermore, anyone that does not wish to hold BTC - understandable due to its significant volatility - must convert it again into the preferred currency. Fees = friction, and there's enough friction now that people will only use it when it provides some significant utility.
uoylj 6y ago
You can check it yourself: https://sci-hub.st/support https://sci-hub.st/support https://blockstream.info/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns https://blockstream.info/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9q...

LockAndLol 6y ago

Is the Sci-Hub archive available over torrent or some other P2P system? It would make it an absolute fools errand to take it down as it would keep popping back up. I don't know a single person who actually donates in bitcoin, so it's surprising to me that she managed to raise 900k in 2018. Bonkers

catsdanxe 6y ago
Yes there are torrents for libgen and scihub. They are not user friendly. One torrent contains hundreds of files without human identifiers. You need a copy of their database to know what the files are.
sixtyfourbits 6y ago
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ It's something like 75TB last time I checked, over 82 million articles in total. Each torrent contains 100,000 articles, named by DOI. If sci-hub ever gets taken offline, there are enough full backups out there that it can be re-instated fairly quickly (at least the archive of existing articles; the credentials necessary to obtain new ones are not included in these torrents or database dumps).

cracker_jacks 6y ago

If there was ever a noble application of the decentralized, uncensorable technologies ideas bourne out of the crypto community, this would be it.

RandomBacon 6y ago
Bitcoin is not uncensorable. Miners have the ability to censor transactions based on the sender/receiver/amount.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  Correct, but this requires miner collusion. If just one miner says no (or isn't contactable by the colluding party) then the transaction can make it into a block. If this ever became a practical issue, which I doubt, then censored people would only need to switch to any coin that supports stealth addresses. Edit: I also suppose, the colluding miners could also try to mine a competing fork to censor a block. This would be rightfully called out as a 51% attack attempt, though.
- xur17 6y ago
  Has there ever been a case where this occurred (with a market clearing mining fee is included)? You only need one miner to include the transaction.
  - jnwatson 6y ago
    Yes. Treasury has tried to tighten the screws somewhat. [1] *. https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-currency-addresses-first-time-releases-new-guidance/ https://www.clearytradewatch.com/2018/12/ofac-lists-digital-... You are correct that you only need one miner, but that miner has to win a block.
  - kolinko 6y ago
    There’s a ton, actually. Bitcoin has a system of “standard” transactions, that is the ones that are accepted by miners, vs. “valid” transactions that are accepted by nodes. Any nonstandard transaction will be rejected by 90 if not 100%, miners, but if you get lucky to get someone to mine it, it will work fine with the protocol. The nonstandard txs are any that are something more than a transfer, multisig (i.e. the ones that have some sort of smart contract capability). This is not theoretical - literally killed my project of decentralised oracles (Orisi) back in 2014. Our beta transactions were accepted only by 10% of miners, so you had to wait for hours to get your tx through. Perhaps it changed - I think in 2018 not even one mining pool accepted that, but perhaps by now they fixed it, although I doubt that. May seem like a small thing, but I met other projects that bumped into it. They had the tech, just didn’t manage to convinve miners to accept their transactions.

oli5679 6y ago

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy

kemonocode 6y ago

I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela. Yes, I know Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't being used by everyone. Yes, I'm aware of the risks and the costs. But it's still a huge boon as crypto allowed me to transact at all when it was physically unfeasible to do so. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until such reality changes: most people who disregard cryptocurrency as just a fad can afford to think that way. Their needs are served by traditional banking, and that's fine! But it's not the reality for an important amount of people who are unbanked for whatever reason: their past, their actions (whether moral things considered illegal and thus they're prosecuted, or legal things that society consider immoral and thus they're censored) or even just a geographical accident.

Barrin92 6y ago
I think it's a reasonable solution at the margins as long as the situtation in countries like Venezuela is as bad as it is. I don't think many people dispute that. But as a solution for the institutional failures it still is not a replacement and obviously the solution in Venezuela needs to be repairing the system. Same with Sci-Hub in this case. The Bitcoin donations alleviate financial pressure somewhat, but of course the lawsuits and IP-infringement will still haunt everyone involved.
- cinquemb 6y ago
  > I think it's a reasonable solution at the margins Reasonable solutions at the margins tend to be adapted in some major way by the masses in time, like bottleneck microstates can end up driving steady state long term behaviors of systems in glassy dynamics… technical solutions to make lawsuits and IP-infrignment have no teeth are being adopted more everyday but not as fast as some would like.
- mariuolo 6y ago
  > the lawsuits and IP-infringement will still haunt everyone involved. I suspect donations are used mostly to keep the lights on.
- 6y ago

trav4225 6y ago

Some relevant TLDR background from the article: "A self-described Communist in her political views, Elbakyan believes the paywall policy of science publishing is a kind of censorship."

iamstupidsimple 6y ago
Communist but taking donations? At least she's right on paywall publishing being total bollocks.
- PudgePacket 6y ago
  Just because you have an ideological belief doesn't mean you're somehow magically exempt from participating in the currently capitalist world. People still need to purchase food, pay bills etc.
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    > currently capitalist world Plenty of communist countries exist, today. Why not move to utopia?

Ghjklov 6y ago

>"Blackballed" Woah woah. Coindesk cancelling imminent?

cwkoss 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackballing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackballing Etymology of blackballed is not racial, if that's what you're suggesting
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
  Blacklist and whitelist are also not racial either but have been "cancelled" by some.
- Ghjklov 6y ago
  "the black ball signifies opposition" Blacklist signifies exclusion. What makes one racist and the other not?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- throw_m239339 6y ago
  Anything can be deemed "racial" today. "blacklist" wasn't racial either until it was deemed racial by corporations like GitHub.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

Aachen 6y ago

Is this new? I've been meaning to donate but didn't want to do the whole gdpr-questionable bitcoin exchange identification thing, so only when Keybase was taken over I asked a friend to help convert those Lumens into a bitcoin donation to sci-hub. Glancing through the article, it doesn't sound like PayPal was an option for most of the last decade now? I'm also not too thrilled about supporting this super wasteful currency, a PoS or similar alternative being supported would be quite welcome.

johnyzee 6y ago
You can buy bitcoin at 7-11 and CVS now, with only a $5 fee: https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-can-now-buy-bitcoin-at-cvs7-eleven-rite-aid/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-can-...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela. Did you see this: https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9aef0f6cb2c0464f7f0b008f918d2d72d80b262d https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=p... Despite the Maduro Regime launching Petro (State-based crytocurrency) they do not accept it for their official documents, nor do they accept Credit Cards, they do however seem to accept BTC. Which makes sense because for a time the Government thugs were raiding Bitcoin miners and taking their rigs and funds. Alexandra is a total badass, I like her defiant attitude towards Academia as a whole, and will be supporting her efforts once again this year. Free access to Scientific Journals is fundamental for a well Educated populace and should be available to all who seek the knowledge. What's even crazier is that COVID has shown us that in dire situations, the walled-garden Peer Reviewed system isn't always best: https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-journals-dont-really-do-their-job/ https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-journal... I've seen how petty the peer reviewed system is in the 'publish or die' model in the Health Sciences, its petty and pathetic to see grown men and women alike having to resort to such unscrupulous antics to keep up with the illusion that this is what serves as one of the notable metrics for tenure. As much as I like SciHub, I hope that her success is measured not by the amount of domains and servers she was able to maintain, but by her/SciHub no longer being needed as the paradigm finally shifted.

tim333 6y ago
Petro was a bit of a joke I think, mostly seeming to require a transfer of funds from Venzulean banks and the like to a petro fund presumably controlled by Maduro or friends and family thereof, in return for petro coins that you can't do anything much with. Credit cards are I guess blocked by US sanctions. At least bitcoin works.

stevespang 6y ago

Let me tell you all the ways I DESPISE Paypal . . .

DoctorOetker 6y ago

If an advanced alien species popped up, and were to observe humanity today, it probably would have a hard time understanding why a species would intentionally cripple its future so hard by punishing violators of copy-'right'. It would even be astonished if there weren't any copyright: it wouldn't understand why empty HDD's weren't 90% capacity preloaded with STEM materials at the manufacturing plant. The user could always format. The majority of nations are lagging in the majority of STEM subjects, why on earth don't they impose a differential STEMpty-ness tax on imported HDD's? Want to import a drive without randomized sampling of research, current and historical? pay extra to the STEM drive pot; imported a STEM drive? receive a little extra from the STEM drive pot.

deleted 6y ago
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metrokoi 6y ago
I find it interesting that humans always assume alien behavior would be exactly the behavior that they believe is the best behavior for humans. We can't project our ethics on to aliens, there are an infinite number of evolutionary strategies that may develop. Aliens may view enslaving the majority of their fellow species and keeping them uneducated as ethical because it might make for a more efficient structure. More likely, all of their concepts would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to us. Anyway, putting STEM material on every computer wouldn't do anything because the barrier isn't the availability of knowledge, it's that most people aren't interested in that information. 99.9% of human knowledge is easily available online, just as easy if not easier than opening a file on a HDD. That's not to say that SciHub isn't necessary, because it is and I use it all the time.
hedora 6y ago
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Max Headroom, especially Season 2. Episode 13: “Lessons” The series is about a sci-fi dystopia. Unfortunately, most of their predictions have come to pass. That episode is particularly relevant. When it aired, it seemed absurd that we would cripple our future by punishing people that freely disseminated educational materials. I guess I’m old enough to play the part of the “advanced” alien species in your hypothetical.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rglover 6y ago

I hope things like this mean Stripe will bring back Bitcoin support. I understand why they muted it at the time but it seems like high time to have their level of engineering backing something like that out in the wild. I'd love to have BTC options available. Does anybody know of any similar APIs for doing BTC payments (or accepting cards and having the funds auto-converted to BTC)?

DethNinja 6y ago
Well beauty of bitcoin is that you can be your own payment processor: https://btcpayserver.org/ https://btcpayserver.org/ There are other alternatives available as well. Main problem is taxes and legality though, right now it is better to sell your software with fiat money and convert it to bitcoin through personal investment, at least this way your company won’t be under legal risk due to accepting BTC.

vmception 6y ago

So although stablecoins exist which are great for predictable commerce (having a treasury of the amount value you expected), a key piece of the infrastructure is that Ethereum clients don't work over Tor. Most stablecoin activity is on the Ethereum network, and the clients have never prioritized Tor use. Ethereum also hosts privacy that all fungible assets can inherit, using Tornado.cash people can trade notes of unknown amounts, redeemable any time. Using Aztec people can make any token private, and communities can consider doing private-by-default tokens including with stablecoins if the issuer started it that way. So its not as simple as Bitcoin OR Monero. There is a looming large piece of the puzzle that simply is missing one piece - ease of use over Tor. Layer2 solutions on Ethereum also inherit privacy inadvertently, while solving scaling issues on layer1. Of course, sci-hub doesn't NEED Tor itself for donations, being fairly benign, but as soon as that piece exists, many tech savvy people simply use that route. Monero will likely remain superior but technically lesser solutions can solve the actual market needs better, since the attack surface isn't that consequential.

mirimir 6y ago
> ... Ethereum clients don't work over Tor. That's always bothered me. It also amazes me how much clients seem restricted to smartphones and Chrome.
Scott_Sanderson 6y ago
What's the relevance of whether eth clients work over Tor? A wallet's history would be available on a block explorer like etherscan.io whether the transaction had been broadcast over Tor network or not. I run a bitcoin node over Tor but it does not change how any money spent from that wallet is viewed by the network compared to spending from a non-Tor wallet.
- mirimir 6y ago
  I wouldn't want my ISP-assigned IP address to be associated with my Monero transactions. And VPNs, even nested VPN chains, provide far less anonymity than Tor. Edit: s/Bitcoin/Monero/g
- 6y ago

bouncycastle 6y ago

I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful. Electricity required to process a single transaction equal the consumption of 18 days for an average US household (source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption) Not only power consumption, these things generate large amounts of e-waste too, comparable to the e-waste generation of Luxemburg (source https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/) It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of its value in just a few days)

1ark 6y ago
> I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful. Wasteful compared to what? > It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of its value in just a few days) It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes. After that you can move it to a stable coin if you want to be exposed to USD (or gold) instead.
- bouncycastle 6y ago
  > Wasteful compared to what? Compared to every alternative. Look up the sources I've linked,. the amount of energy used by Bitcoin is ludacris and unsustainable. > It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes 10 minutes on average, but that's only 1 confirmation. You'll need to wait 6 before you can ship the goods. Current cost is $0.50 - so both slow and expensive. (source https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/ https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/) > After that you can move it to a stable coin There are no stable coins on bitcoin (that I'm aware of) and you can't use one nativelly. Even if there are, they are custodial risks involved plus moving requires another transaction.
  - madmaniak 6y ago
    There's no safe alternative in sources you've linked. Also traditional system has huge cost hidden in inflation. The cost of bitcoin and all these footprints is minimal - you get rid off central banks, banks, visa and others. They have the biggest buildings all around the planet filled with the most expensive workers - all the infrastructure runs on much more electricity than few households. And you compare only the payment process cost. What a luck of imagination.

hirundo 6y ago

"Alexandra Elbakyan, a 31-year-old freelance coder, neurobiologist and phylologist, is running a database of over 80 million articles from academic journals that are normally available only through subscriptions." A modern Prometheus. Some plinths have recently opened up. A statue of this woman would make a nice replacement.

entropyneur 6y ago
Careful there. Beside this undoubtedly noble deed she has indulged in some less than impeccable political expression. Meanwhile it looks like a holistic approach to moral evaluation of statues is gaining traction so it might end up a waste of copper.
- new2628 6y ago
  "holistic approach to moral evaluation" I'm not holding my breath for that one.
- hardlianotion 6y ago
  Holistic is not the term that springs to my mind.
- Funes- 6y ago
  >less than impeccable political expression According to whom? Care to point us to some of those comments?
  - entropyneur 6y ago
    According to me :). But there are quite a few people in Russia who would agree. It's in Russian, but here we go: https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204 https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204 It might be difficult to understand what's so bad without being embedded into the Russian political context. So here's some more direct stuff from SciHub social media: https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852 https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852 - Stalin quotes https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498 https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498 - comparing Stalin to Christ

uoylj 6y ago

Haha, it's like PayPal is actively trying to make itself completely obsolete, especially when you couple it with this news: https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-venmo-to-roll-out-crypto-buying-and-selling https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-venmo-to-roll-out-crypto-buy...

Causality1 6y ago

I still don't see how anyone can claim with a straight face that taxpayer-funded research shouldn't be public domain.

hedora 6y ago

I usually don’t quote the article, but the last few paragraphs are important and easy to overlook: ——— Elbakyan says she hasn’t approached any political parties or government bodies, thinking they could pick up on the censorship argument if they were interested. She does not believe most people are interested in discussing freedom of knowledge. “There is no real community to discuss that, you hardly hear such voices. Not just in the mainstream media, but even on YouTube, for example. It all died by 2013, when Aaron Swartz died,” she said, adding that even though many people are using her website or pirate websites such as torrent trackers, few care how and why they work. “People don’t think about the [copyright] laws, about doing something about it or voting against it,” Elbakyan says. “When people reach out to me, they usually write to say ‘thank you’ or ask how to better donate.” Sci-Hub’s standoff with the publishing industry is a good fight, Carter (who is also a CoinDesk columnist) believes. “The law and morality don’t always match up, and they certainly don’t in this case,” he said, adding: “Sci-Hub has undeniably made the world a better place, and Alexandra has had to live as a pariah because of it. Funding her operations with bitcoin perfectly demonstrates its value proposition.”

fouc 6y ago
Is there really no community around "freedom of knowledge"? Why not? How can we make it happen?
- john4532452 6y ago
  The internet was originally that pre 2010's
  - fouc 6y ago
    Touché, we need to bring that back.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

I've been mulling this over but why don't people who want some consistent value go with the gold-backed coins? Couldn't tell you which is the best option, but either people convert or Sci-hub could do the exchange instantly or at EoW every week or whatever to get away from the volatility but keep the improved payment. Financial markets are very volatile right now, but Gold is just about the best store of value you can have

lifty 6y ago
Gold backed coins, like PAX, are very easy to censor. While all the coin ownership information sits on the blockchain ledger, the gold sits somewhere in a vault and the custodian company has the capability to blacklist coins. Virtually all gold backed coins have this issues. You need a native digital token to have better censorship resistance.
- hardwaresofton 6y ago
  Ahh thanks -- I didn't think of the censorship angle, that's a showstopper for sure

raxxorrax 6y ago

Paypal has been quite prominent in banning people from their service. Some might deserve it perhaps but I am still against it. Paypal can never be a universal payment processor. If they banned real criminal transactions, sure, but I only have seen them ban people to enhance their image.

berkes 6y ago
> If they banned real criminal This too, is problematic. A private entity should never be the one deciding what is criminal and what is not. Especially if they are providing crucial infrastructure.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  True, we certainly wouldn't want payment processors to make that distinction.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  This is a very stupid thing to argue and I don’t think you actually believe it. Individuals and corporations are responsible for their own activity and are responsible for determining if their own actions are illegal. Nobody is saying PayPal should be the arbiter of law and order or that PayPal is automatically liable for all actions of their users. But if PayPal believes one of their customers is using their service to finance criminal activity, they have a legal duty to respond. An extreme (but plausible) example is child abuse - if PayPal discovers one of their customers is using donations to finance child pornography, PayPal shouldn’t wait for a court order to shut it down. And if they did drag their feet then some PayPal employees need to go to jail.
  - berkes 6y ago
    In your extreme case, it is PayPals duty to inform the authorities. And then to act upon the instructions recieved from that authority. But it is not PayPals duty to decide whether the customer is a criminal or not; that is what the courts or your local version thereof, is for. It might be that in the US, this is different, but in the EU it is not. In fact, in the EU, payment providers are, in several cases, prohibited by law to shut down or inform customers. So if Paypal were to shut down the contract of such a customer, that would be thing that might bring PayPal employees to jail. Now, that is obviously aside from any EULA or other agreements PayPal has with its customers: as a private entity, paypal is free to put arbitrary rules in that contract: dissalow stuff that is otherwise perfectly legal, for example. But that is very different from becoming a judge. Edit: but my point was, that the moment PayPal becomes "critical infrastructure", such arbitrary rules are problematic because, if, say, a PayPal account is required to pay taxes or receive any form of wages, such arbitrary rules will exclude people who then might get into serious trouble. Also, please keep the conversation civil. Calling me "very stupid" does not help to bring your otherwise valid and thoughtful concerns forward.

treebornfrog 6y ago

They should be using Monero. Can't be traced by governments (1). (1). https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39 https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39

akerro 6y ago
This isn't about tracing or hiding source and/or destination. It's about being able to donate at all.

louwrentius 6y ago

And making the plannet a worse place in the process. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...

guico 6y ago

Poor choice of words for this title, especially right now. What about “Blocked by Paypal”?

guico 6y ago

Poor choice of words on the title. What about “Blocked by Paypal...”?

hellofunk 6y ago

PayPal is a thorn in our world. They are atrocious and I wish they'd die. The extraordinary fees they charge for currency conversion, in the form of very unfair rates, should alone be worthy of their demise, and should be criminal.

chriskanan 6y ago

Many academics use Sci-Hub now as an essential service, otherwise they cannot access academic papers unless they are on arxiv or similar sites. Many universities can't afford Elsevier or Springer-Natures prices. If a university lacks access then a graduate student would have to pay $30-100 per article. It is insane. Unfortunately open access is still not sufficient because top journals are frequently not open or researchers cannot afford the price for hybrid open/paywall journals to make their paper open access ($1000-$6000 per paper). Not a fan of Bitcoin though due to its inefficiency and environmental/energy costs. Link to Elsevier open access publishing fees: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi234qDr5_qAhUXQ80KHTigAAoQFjAJegQITxAB&usg=AOvVaw3yuBPUj7bUN8mGb1141I4W https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data...

z3rgl1ng 6y ago

From the article: Elbakyan says bitcoin only constitutes a small part of all donations. Most often, it’s the online payment service Yandex.Money that is available in Russia and nearby countries including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. However, for all the other parts of the world, crypto is the only direct way to support Sci-Hub.

stevedekorte 6y ago

Is there support for lightning? If so, I’ll donate.

deleted 6y ago

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