but i'm not sure
I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
It sounds like you're making a separate accusation, which I have no opinion about. There's nothing in that statement about them owning a significant part of the token supply, though it may be true for all I know. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
I am skeptical of the last part, given the legality issues involved and relatively high risk of prosecution for prolific uploaders (think of Aaron Swartz), it makes very little sense to use a traceable blockchain like Solana for this use case. This system should really be based around an established cryptocurrency that assures anonymity like Monero.
> Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
As far as I'm aware that's how most tokens on Solana work. The entire token supply is created by the project owner and they decide how it gets distributed, and they usually retain a significant portion of the supply to sell in the future when a market has been established and their "monopoly money" is worth something.
You can see this if you click on various tokens at [1] and look at the "Holders" tab. There's usually a single address that owns 20-60% of the total supply, sometimes more.
> As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo.
Their belief is that a project is more likely to fail because it's associated with cryptocurrency. You can challenge that belief by asking yourself whether Sci-Net would be more or less likely to fail if it tried to accept cards or Paypal instead.
Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war.
edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
Alexandra is the founder of Sci-Hub.
What's wrong with Sci-Hub, anyway? (Other than it not being updated anymore, of course).
Why not? She seems to have done a great job.
Yes, but living in Russia.
That's what redirects are for!
> Elbakyan was in conflict with the liberal, pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community.[8] According to her interview, she was attacked on the Internet by 'science popularizers' who supported liberal views that led to the shutdown of Sci-Hub in Russia in 2017 for a few days.[59] In particular, Elbakyan was strongly critical of the former Dynasty Foundation (shut down in 2015) and its associated figures. She believes that the foundation was politicized, tied to Russia's liberal opposition, and fit the legal definition of a "foreign agent".
> She has also done work on religion,[57] and has argued that Stalin was a god of science, and an incarnation both of the god Thoth and the Christian God.[58]
Idk but this sounds so sus that I don't believe her with anything. Arguing that Stalin was good is very similar to arguing that Hitler was.
I took the time to follow the link and read her very short essay on Stalin the God and it's very clearly parody and an attempt at absurdist humor. Russians and Kazakhs can do dry/straightfaced humor as well as the Brits.
Misrepresenting the essay as her honest beliefs is like arguing Monty Python really cannot tell a dead parrot from a live one.
Elbakyan comes across as ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag, but that doesn't mean she isn't doing awesome, vital work.
I just read it, and the excerpts, the random images she chooses to include in it, the straightfaced giant leaps in logic (Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge, the Christian god came from the Middle East, therefore they -- and Stalin -- are one and the same), all reek of something that could have been posted in Something Awful.
I mean, come on:
> Hence Stalin was not just an ancient pagan god - but he was that God christians believe in. In a critical moment for the country and for the whole humanity he came down to Earth, wearing a cool mustache avatar, and restored the order: he revived economics and created the powerful science. He created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG. He won the war against the evil forces of Hitler, and even restored Israel, as he promised to do long time ago.
"Wearing a cool mustache avatar"? You really believe she wrote this in earnest?
Russians have a warped sense of humor. Though I suppose in this day and age, it's impossible to tell when someone is being sarcastic on the Internet ;) I know I can't anymore!
Edit: I do admit her subjects of interest are all over the place though. I'll grant you that!
It really seems like you are though. The linked page says the transaction is between the article requester and the article contributor, and that she's not taking any money, even to support the platform. So, it seems like you're saying she's lying about that.
Russia is not a free country where you can, just, idealistically handle large amounts of cryptocurrency as you please. It's literally a mafia state! They take what they want! Foreign currency, and in particular cryptocurrency, is a priority for that war regime right now. Huge targets on the backs of anyone associated with things like this.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate... ("Once Celebrated in Russia, Programmer Pavel Durov Chooses Exile (nytimes.com)" (2014))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686868
> "When a SWAT team appeared at Pavel Durov’s door in St. Petersburg, he started thinking about his future in Russia."
> "He was home alone, and he peered at them through a monitor."
> "“They had guns and they looked very serious,” said Mr. Durov, once Russia’s biggest celebrity entrepreneur. “They seemed to want to break the door.”"
Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
I went looking for a paper for the first time in forever and thought to go to Sci-Hub and was encumbered with whatever this crypto system is, confusingly.
This process isn’t “interesting”, it’s hot bullshit confusion.
> I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription.
Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:
> https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-...
This is actually the reason for the huge increase of the number of requests as the article explicitly admits:
> "The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused."
I hope so, because it sounds dumb.
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
"Interesting"
Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)
"In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."
Back in the old days, you would have to actually start your own cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin) every time you wanted to sell some worthless token. Not only did this result in more technical diversity of cryptocurrencies, but if you got enough people together you could do a 51% attack and take malicious projects off the network.
Nowadays, this would never work. Even if they couldn't hitch a ride on another cryptocurrency, they would just use PoS and with a premine it's basically classical consensus.
Anna's archive is my go-to these days.
A_Duck•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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.
littlestymaar•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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
cge•8mo ago
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
setgree•8mo ago
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...
jsheard•8mo ago
freeone3000•8mo ago
aleph_minus_one•8mo ago
The Sci-Hub meme coin does not take privacy and untraceability very seriously, thus potentially putting lots of its user in danger. :-(
stavros•8mo ago
troyvit•8mo ago
The whole basis of this scheme comes down to trust on so many levels. Like:
> When creating a request, you can specify the amount of tokens uploader will receive for sharing the paper. However, the tokens will not be transferred after uploading the PDF right away, but only after you check the solution and click the 'Accept' button. The tokens subtracted from your account will be added to the uploader.
So a jerk can request a paper, receive the paper, then never pay for the paper if they feel like it.
I think this is just how the community is run.
[1] I guess people could still make a run on sci-hub coins outside of this market, but I bet the scale of the coin will never reach a level that makes that tempting.
cokeandpepsi•8mo ago
How? even the site mentions "The more people use Sci-Hub token, the more valuable it becomes" the entire point is to make the coin price go up
Funes-•8mo ago
It is. You want to reward people for their work in a private and reliable way? Monero's right there.
KingOfCoders•8mo ago
volemo•8mo ago
[1]: Since, afaik, she lives in Russia and sending money in an envelope is made illegal by ФЗ № 176-ФЗ art. 22 p. "г".
PeterStuer•8mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•8mo ago
May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.
troyvit•8mo ago
alxfoster•8mo ago
stavros•8mo ago
immibis•8mo ago
bawolff•8mo ago
If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing.
Hence seems like the right tool for the job.
NoMoreNicksLeft•8mo ago
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
beeflet•8mo ago
The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.
You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
NoMoreNicksLeft•8mo ago
I don't know that it's a divisibility problem in general... I would say that the USD conversion ratio is instead just insane. If it had kept to something reasonable in that regard, then divisibility wouldn't be an issue. It's something like 1 millionth of a bitcoin, more than enough. When I looked it up just before posting, I thought "I'll have to delete this comment before I finish writing it out, because you can still send small enough dollar amounts". And it kind of does work, the only thing I know of that's marked in tenths of a cent is gasoline. But the transaction fees are just absurd. $1 per just isn't low enough for anything smaller than buying a new car. If it is truly meant to be a currency, then I should be able to buy anything I can buy with the dollar at any retail store. Without thinking "Hey I need to buy more stuff so my transaction fee isn't wasted."
I wish bitcoin could've worked. But not only did it flunk out hard, it's just sucking up all the air out of the room so that newer, better solutions could get a foothold. If I was only a little more paranoid, I'd see conspiracy in all of this.
beeflet•8mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
take it with a grain of salt.
beeflet•8mo ago
theptip•8mo ago
daveguy•8mo ago
Mistletoe•8mo ago
beeflet•8mo ago
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.
aleph_minus_one•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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.
eagleed•8mo ago
What it can do is incentivize certain behavior by playing part in the distributed algorithm. But adding more tokens to the supply does not by itself make the economy produce more.
alphazard•8mo ago
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•8mo ago
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_•8mo ago
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.