5 ms·

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote infor

by A_Duck 1y ago

Why must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act

tux3 1y 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 1y 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.
Medicineguy 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
littlestymaar 1y 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).
cge 1y 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 1y 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. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
  - cge 1y ago
setgree 1y 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. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-student-behind-sci-hub https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...
- jsheard 1y ago
  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.
  - freeone3000 1y 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 1y 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. :-(
    - stavros 1y ago
      Yeah but it's kind of like if I'm buying a Sci-Hub gift card, or loading my Sci-Hub wallet with some balance. If you want anonymity, use Monero, it would have solved all the issues here. Sci-hub could even take a cut, which personally I'd have no objections to.
Mistletoe 1y 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 1y 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...). > In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. Partially, you can: - Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself - Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job - Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a few more years - Buy healthy stuff, and have a healthy lifestyle; invest money in your wellness - Less of a necessity to work lots of hours a day, i.e. have more free time
    - beeflet 1y ago
      It's worth discussing. This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else? The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable. Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things. Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns. I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
alphazard 1y 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.
logifail 1y 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.
_bin_ 1y ago
I am a major hater of many (most?) crypto applications, which should tell you something since the idea of a decentralized currency outside state control is one that deeply appeals to my principles. But this is one of the better applications I've seen. Running centralized infra for this specific case is extremely difficult and, generally speaking, it makes sense to give people the option to express to willingness to pay for what's essentially a priority request. This isn't pay-for-access, it's "I'll offer some reward for you to get the paper now, after which it is still accessible to everyone." My big quibble is with the implementation: there really doesn't need to be a sci-hub memecoin. Monero is purpose-built for this sort of thing. Use Monero (or zcash, I suppose.) Easy litmus test: if a DNM opened up that only supported transactions in its own "memecoin", how many people would take it seriously? Zero.

by A_Duck 1y ago

tux3 1y 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 1y 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.

Medicineguy 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

littlestymaar 1y 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).

cge 1y 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 1y 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. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
- cge 1y ago

setgree 1y 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. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-student-behind-sci-hub https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...

jsheard 1y ago
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.
- freeone3000 1y 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 1y 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. :-(
  - stavros 1y ago
    Yeah but it's kind of like if I'm buying a Sci-Hub gift card, or loading my Sci-Hub wallet with some balance. If you want anonymity, use Monero, it would have solved all the issues here. Sci-hub could even take a cut, which personally I'd have no objections to.

Mistletoe 1y 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 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...). > In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. Partially, you can: - Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself - Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job - Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a few more years - Buy healthy stuff, and have a healthy lifestyle; invest money in your wellness - Less of a necessity to work lots of hours a day, i.e. have more free time
  - beeflet 1y ago
    It's worth discussing. This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else? The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable. Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things. Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns. I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

alphazard 1y 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.

logifail 1y 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.

_bin_ 1y ago

I am a major hater of many (most?) crypto applications, which should tell you something since the idea of a decentralized currency outside state control is one that deeply appeals to my principles. But this is one of the better applications I've seen. Running centralized infra for this specific case is extremely difficult and, generally speaking, it makes sense to give people the option to express to willingness to pay for what's essentially a priority request. This isn't pay-for-access, it's "I'll offer some reward for you to get the paper now, after which it is still accessible to everyone." My big quibble is with the implementation: there really doesn't need to be a sci-hub memecoin. Monero is purpose-built for this sort of thing. Use Monero (or zcash, I suppose.) Easy litmus test: if a DNM opened up that only supported transactions in its own "memecoin", how many people would take it seriously? Zero.