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
If there was every a ready-made use case for crypto, it's this. Alexandra Elbakyan is both a criminal in most places and a hero to many [0]. I want her to keep doing what she's doing, and that means someone probably has to pay her to do it. The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job.
Even if crypto is the only viable way to do this, doing it with their own memecoin instead of something that's already well established is a massive red flag. That means they can easily pre-mine vast amounts of their token for effectively nothing and then cash out by selling them all at once when the price peaks. Textbook shitcoin rug-pull.
I hear what you're saying, but as a guy who knows this much |-----| about crypto, I would be worried about the same thing using anybody else's coin. Sci-net having full control over the value of the coin means they don't have to worry as much about uncontrollable fluctuations in coin price going with an established coin, especially now that governments are getting in on the action.[1]
The whole basis of this scheme comes down to trust on so many levels. Like:
> When creating a request, you can specify the amount of tokens uploader will receive for sharing the paper. However, the tokens will not be transferred after uploading the PDF right away, but only after you check the solution and click the 'Accept' button. The tokens subtracted from your account will be added to the uploader.
So a jerk can request a paper, receive the paper, then never pay for the paper if they feel like it.
I think this is just how the community is run.
[1] I guess people could still make a run on sci-hub coins outside of this market, but I bet the scale of the coin will never reach a level that makes that tempting.
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.
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.
> 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. :-(
>The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job.
May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.
IMHO, Monero checks every box. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as most think. Monero may be a little more difficult to exchange but last I checked, most major exchanges outside of Coinbase still support it.
It only has low fees because nobody uses it. The same thing happens to Bitcoin. Someone said the transaction fee is about $0.10 right now (I didn't check) but when people are actually using Bitcoin, that jumps up to around $20.
>If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals,
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network.
The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.
You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
>You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> publishers can't pursue those violations too severely
A decade ago the publishing system harassed a researcher because he was downloading too many papers, going after him for millions in copyright "damages," only stopping proceedings after he ended his own life.
Yes, and we still talk about him and that one case today, a decade later. It was also a case where circumstances around it (the 'breaking' into an unlocked cabinet, the 'hidden' laptop, the different university, the manifesto, and so on) all allowed the case to be presented as particularly bad by publishers and the government.
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
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.
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).
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.
Money is either a hard-to-forge representation of the value of a variable in a distributed algorithm, or a claim on a share of the total output of the economy. It is a coordination tool, not "condensed time". It doesn't have any inherent value in isolation, and you can't eat it any more than you can eat political power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it.
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
I thought the taxation vs inflation point you made in an earlier edit of this comment was a good one, did something make you change your mind to remove it?
No, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this:
"In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."
The new trend of starting a "token" on top of some PoS cryptocurrency greatly saddens me.
Back in the old days, you would have to actually start your own cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin) every time you wanted to sell some worthless token. Not only did this result in more technical diversity of cryptocurrencies, but if you got enough people together you could do a 51% attack and take malicious projects off the network.
Nowadays, this would never work. Even if they couldn't hitch a ride on another cryptocurrency, they would just use PoS and with a premine it's basically classical consensus.
Special-purpose tokens are perfectly fine, and in fact, are what you should do whenever you want to represent something specific. You can make a token that represents an article request, or a bond, or a share of an investment fund, or anything else, and then someone can trade a certain number of them. Also, the market can figure out how much one of them is worth. It might even be more stable than the base token, as in the case of DAI (an decentralized stablecoin on the Ethereum chain).
"On Sci-Net, you're using tokens directly to reward uploaders. Payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
While I agree this is phrased in somewhat misleading way, I think by "fellow researchers" they ment "researchers like you, user, who believe and participate in liberation of science", not "the researchers, who authored the paper you're trying to pirate".
They don't need to take a cut of the transaction because they'll effectively own a significant part of the token supply. They make their "cut" whenever someone buys their tokens.
Well, I'm responding to someone who said one of the purposes of the coin was to make money to pay for infrastructure, which the article specifically says is not true.
It sounds like you're making a separate accusation, which I have no opinion about. There's nothing in that statement about them owning a significant part of the token supply, though it may be true for all I know. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
Why even use sci-hub anymore? With the lack of updates, instability over petty stuff like naming a wasp after the founder, etc. I don't see why anyone would use sci-hub over Anna's Archive.
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
I think that also works in the favor of Sci-hub though.
> I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription.
Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
> Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources.
The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:
I went looking for a paper for the first time in forever and thought to go to Sci-Hub and was encumbered with whatever this crypto system is, confusingly.
This process isn’t “interesting”, it’s hot bullshit confusion.
It require token payment for invitation codes, however the current implementation is frustrating. It generate a QR code for mobile wallet, but there's no way to pay from a browser wallet, which I suppose is more commonly used in web3.
It seems like this coin mechanic is just for people who want to request specific articles that aren't already on Sci-hub, and those who upload requested papers. So, for everyone who doesn't want to engage with that system, there's no change, right?
I've never been able to get anything provided by Nexus bots (or Lib STC which I believe is the same project?). I'm sure it works for some people but I probably tried on 5 or 10 different occasions at this point and it never worked :(
Are there any successful crypto adjacent projects that do well outside the crypto-sphere? As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo. But maybe I'm biased.
Even so, the AUM of the underlying hedge fund has been going up. They've stopped publishing the fund's performance, though, so it's a little unclear if the increase is due to good performance or if they've just attracted more investors.
Saying that most crypto projects end up failing is about as interesting as saying that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The vast majority of projects fail in general.
Yet it's obvious why it's stupid to say that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The majority of projects fail, but we see successful projects all around us. I don't see any related to cryptocurrency. In fact, I've only ever seen them adopted as speculative investments.
Almost unrelated, but this is one of the domains that just show up as "Server Not Found" by default to users in Germany. It's getting blocked by ISPs on the domain level after a "voluntary agreement" with copyright holders:
https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-reinforces-paywall-with-s...
Hold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin?
Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war.
edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
> I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way.
It really seems like you are though. The linked page says the transaction is between the article requester and the article contributor, and that she's not taking any money, even to support the platform. So, it seems like you're saying she's lying about that.
If the FSB is leaning on her to do things under threat of violence, it's not a reflection on her ideals. I've emphasized this distinction as clearly as I possibly could. You cannot say "no" to goons with baseballs bats—read up on why Pavel Durov "quit" VK, and fled Russia [0].
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.
> "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.”"
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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!
If "guilty by association" is to be applied evenly, we should do the same for genocidal countries like Israel, but that would be absurd. Also, I'm not sure, but I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen.
I didn't say that isn't true. But her as a person is not who I would want in charge of this "movement". Luckily sci-hub is not the leading source of free scientific articles anymore.
Doesn't Anna's Archive have Sci-Hub as one of its main sources? If so, claiming it's lucky this is an alternative to Sci-Hub doesn't make a lot of sense.
But given that we know nothing about the person calling themselves "Anna", how can you be sure it's better than Sci-Hub? Maybe this Anna is also living in Russia.
What's wrong with Sci-Hub, anyway? (Other than it not being updated anymore, of course).
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
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-s...
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.
I hear what you're saying, but as a guy who knows this much |-----| about crypto, I would be worried about the same thing using anybody else's coin. Sci-net having full control over the value of the coin means they don't have to worry as much about uncontrollable fluctuations in coin price going with an established coin, especially now that governments are getting in on the action.[1]
The whole basis of this scheme comes down to trust on so many levels. Like:
> When creating a request, you can specify the amount of tokens uploader will receive for sharing the paper. However, the tokens will not be transferred after uploading the PDF right away, but only after you check the solution and click the 'Accept' button. The tokens subtracted from your account will be added to the uploader.
So a jerk can request a paper, receive the paper, then never pay for the paper if they feel like it.
I think this is just how the community is run.
[1] I guess people could still make a run on sci-hub coins outside of this market, but I bet the scale of the coin will never reach a level that makes that tempting.
> uncontrollable fluctuations in coin price going with an established coin
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
>doing it with their own memecoin instead of something that's already well established is a massive red flag.
It is. You want to reward people for their work in a private and reliable way? Monero's right there.
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.
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.
> 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. :-(
Exactly. Whatever your opinions on crypto, it should not be controversial that black market transactions are a perfect fit.
Yup. It's literally the primary use for crypto.
the traceability of bitcoin presents a problem in this situation. bitcoin isn't exactly fungible.
>The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job.
May have been true long ago, but when speculators are hoping to get rich-quick holding bitcoin for another n months, no one's going to spend it. Bitcoiners ruined bitcoin. It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.
Yeah I would love to hear from people who know what _would_ be a better coin to use than a) Bitcoin and b) your own meme-coin.
IMHO, Monero checks every box. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as most think. Monero may be a little more difficult to exchange but last I checked, most major exchanges outside of Coinbase still support it.
I agree about Monero, it's anonymous, fungible, and has low fees and high speed.
It only has low fees because nobody uses it. The same thing happens to Bitcoin. Someone said the transaction fee is about $0.10 right now (I didn't check) but when people are actually using Bitcoin, that jumps up to around $20.
> It's not the right tool for anything, other than maybe paying traceless bribes to Congressmen.
If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing.
Hence seems like the right tool for the job.
>If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals,
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
payment channels and the "lightning network" present solutions to the micro-transaction problem for bitcoin. They are worth looking into. However on bitcoin, they wouldn't be sufficient alone to scale up the network.
The problems of bitcoin go back to the 2017 block size wars. I think it is possible to scale the network up through a combination of measures (bigger blocks, payment channels, atomic swaps). But for better or worse, the current (BTC) developers have prioritized maintaining bitcoin's legacy and have split off from the other group of developers (BCH and others) specializing it into an efficient payment network. So BTC itself is a bad example of what cryptocurrency is capable of today, it has old network parameters that sort of gimp it. Those $1 fees you're seeing are not representative of the current state of technology.
You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices. The floor of 0.1 cents is prohibitive for a lot of micro-transactions. It's not hard to imagine a world in which 1 satoshi is worth a couple dollars or something, which would pretty much eliminate the use case of micro-transactions altogether.
>You make a good point that bitcoin isn't really divisible enough, with the current prices.
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.
here's your conspiracy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
take it with a grain of salt.
Send her money in an envelope if you want to pay her.
That would be actually illegal [1] while investing in her memecoin is only grey area.
[1]: Since, afaik, she lives in Russia and sending money in an envelope is made illegal by ФЗ № 176-ФЗ art. 22 p. "г".
How would I know she could collect it?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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
Yes, and we still talk about him and that one case today, a decade later. It was also a case where circumstances around it (the 'breaking' into an unlocked cabinet, the 'hidden' laptop, the different university, the manifesto, and so on) all allowed the case to be presented as particularly bad by publishers and the government.
And that's the risk here, in part: this system allows the practice to be presented as a paid criminal enterprise, and allows individual users to be presented as criminal participants.
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.
> 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).
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.
Money is either a hard-to-forge representation of the value of a variable in a distributed algorithm, or a claim on a share of the total output of the economy. It is a coordination tool, not "condensed time". It doesn't have any inherent value in isolation, and you can't eat it any more than you can eat political power.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it.
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
"Interesting"
https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif
> designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator
Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)
Yes, but that should be done in a way more transparent way (donations, fees, etc.) than manipulating the tokenomics of the coin out from under you.
I thought the taxation vs inflation point you made in an earlier edit of this comment was a good one, did something make you change your mind to remove it?
No, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this:
"In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."
Benefiting the system is way more imporltant.
At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.
The new trend of starting a "token" on top of some PoS cryptocurrency greatly saddens me.
Back in the old days, you would have to actually start your own cryptocurrency (like Dogecoin) every time you wanted to sell some worthless token. Not only did this result in more technical diversity of cryptocurrencies, but if you got enough people together you could do a 51% attack and take malicious projects off the network.
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.
Special-purpose tokens are perfectly fine, and in fact, are what you should do whenever you want to represent something specific. You can make a token that represents an article request, or a bond, or a share of an investment fund, or anything else, and then someone can trade a certain number of them. Also, the market can figure out how much one of them is worth. It might even be more stable than the base token, as in the case of DAI (an decentralized stablecoin on the Ethereum chain).
"On Sci-Net, you're using tokens directly to reward uploaders. Payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
I think you right. But researchers can upload their own papers. Seem to require a paying requester and the researcher has to notice the request.
While I agree this is phrased in somewhat misleading way, I think by "fellow researchers" they ment "researchers like you, user, who believe and participate in liberation of science", not "the researchers, who authored the paper you're trying to pirate".
the point is not to pay researchers (lol), but to encourage uploaders with karma points, while paying for sci-hub infrastructure...
They make it very clear they aren't taking a cut. The quote in the linked page is "payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
They don't need to take a cut of the transaction because they'll effectively own a significant part of the token supply. They make their "cut" whenever someone buys their tokens.
Well, I'm responding to someone who said one of the purposes of the coin was to make money to pay for infrastructure, which the article specifically says is not true.
It sounds like you're making a separate accusation, which I have no opinion about. There's nothing in that statement about them owning a significant part of the token supply, though it may be true for all I know. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
Why even use sci-hub anymore? With the lack of updates, instability over petty stuff like naming a wasp after the founder, etc. I don't see why anyone would use sci-hub over Anna's Archive.
You should have started, not ended, your post with "Anna's Archive" ;D I did not know of it, which is why I used scihub.
In case Anna's archive goes down, plenty of people will be glad that SciHub exists. And vice versa, of course.
Because I didn't know of anything better.
> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.
Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
I think that also works in the favor of Sci-hub though.
> I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription.
Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
> Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources.
The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:
> https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-...
This is actually the reason for the huge increase of the number of requests as the article explicitly admits:
> "The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused."
> https://sci-hub.se/sci-net
This.
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.
Are these papers returned back into sci-hub? I don't quite follow why it seems like there's now two different repositories of papers.
if i understood, it becomes part of sci hub
but i'm not sure
yes, it's written
It require token payment for invitation codes, however the current implementation is frustrating. It generate a QR code for mobile wallet, but there's no way to pay from a browser wallet, which I suppose is more commonly used in web3.
It seems like this coin mechanic is just for people who want to request specific articles that aren't already on Sci-hub, and those who upload requested papers. So, for everyone who doesn't want to engage with that system, there's no change, right?
I hope so, because it sounds dumb.
It's nexus and telegram bots these days. Don't fall for sci net.
I've never been able to get anything provided by Nexus bots (or Lib STC which I believe is the same project?). I'm sure it works for some people but I probably tried on 5 or 10 different occasions at this point and it never worked :(
Anna's archive is my go-to these days.
Are there any successful crypto adjacent projects that do well outside the crypto-sphere? As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo. But maybe I'm biased.
Numerai? Though I'm not so sure - their coin seems to have lost a lot of dollar value since I last checked.
https://numer.ai/
Even so, the AUM of the underlying hedge fund has been going up. They've stopped publishing the fund's performance, though, so it's a little unclear if the increase is due to good performance or if they've just attracted more investors.
Saying that most crypto projects end up failing is about as interesting as saying that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The vast majority of projects fail in general.
Yet it's obvious why it's stupid to say that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The majority of projects fail, but we see successful projects all around us. I don't see any related to cryptocurrency. In fact, I've only ever seen them adopted as speculative investments.
I find Nano-gpt [0] extraordinarily useful, and a great use case for next-gen, non-scammy crypto.
0 - https://nano-gpt.com/conversation/new
Why not just use Anna's archive at this point?
It's better to have redundancy with these things. I would rather see both Anna's archive and SciHub stay operational.
Almost unrelated, but this is one of the domains that just show up as "Server Not Found" by default to users in Germany. It's getting blocked by ISPs on the domain level after a "voluntary agreement" with copyright holders: https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-reinforces-paywall-with-s...
Learn to setup your own DNS resolving infrastructure (or, if you need an ad-hoc solution immediately, learn how to use a different DNS resolver).
same in France it seems
Hold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin?
Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war.
edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
She's Kazakh and lives in Kazachstan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
>Since 2011, she has been living in Russia.[10][11][12][13]
Yeah, hard to dispute an auto-biography! Not actually a PDF but guess she didn't want to break the link: https://sci-hub.st/alexandra/bio.pdf
> she didn't want to break the link
That's what redirects are for!
> I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way.
It really seems like you are though. The linked page says the transaction is between the article requester and the article contributor, and that she's not taking any money, even to support the platform. So, it seems like you're saying she's lying about that.
If the FSB is leaning on her to do things under threat of violence, it's not a reflection on her ideals. I've emphasized this distinction as clearly as I possibly could. You cannot say "no" to goons with baseballs bats—read up on why Pavel Durov "quit" VK, and fled Russia [0].
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.”"
If its ok to bribe the president with planes, who are we to judge for science
Wikipedia:
> Elbakyan was in conflict with the liberal, pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community.[8] According to her interview, she was attacked on the Internet by 'science popularizers' who supported liberal views that led to the shutdown of Sci-Hub in Russia in 2017 for a few days.[59] In particular, Elbakyan was strongly critical of the former Dynasty Foundation (shut down in 2015) and its associated figures. She believes that the foundation was politicized, tied to Russia's liberal opposition, and fit the legal definition of a "foreign agent".
> She has also done work on religion,[57] and has argued that Stalin was a god of science, and an incarnation both of the god Thoth and the Christian God.[58]
Idk but this sounds so sus that I don't believe her with anything. Arguing that Stalin was good is very similar to arguing that Hitler was.
> 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.
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.
(Shrug) If her support for Stalin and Russkiy Mir in general is parody, she fooled me.
Elbakyan comes across as ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag, but that doesn't mean she isn't doing awesome, vital work.
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!
If "guilty by association" is to be applied evenly, we should do the same for genocidal countries like Israel, but that would be absurd. Also, I'm not sure, but I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen.
> I believe Elbakyan is actually a Kazakh citizen.
Yes, but living in Russia.
So is Snowden. Your point is?
If Snowden suddenly launched a cryptocurrency now the same skepticism would be prudent.
Providing missing context to the conversation.
And she's not very noble to begin with.
She honestly made the world a better place. Having access to scientific literature no matter where I am has certainly improved my life immensely.
I didn't say that isn't true. But her as a person is not who I would want in charge of this "movement". Luckily sci-hub is not the leading source of free scientific articles anymore.
> But her as a person is not who I would want in charge of this "movement"
Why not? She seems to have done a great job.
what's the leading source nowadays?
Anna's Archive
Doesn't Anna's Archive have Sci-Hub as one of its main sources? If so, claiming it's lucky this is an alternative to Sci-Hub doesn't make a lot of sense.
Yeah I wonder what's the backstory there, Anna' is Sci-Hub founder no? Guessing Anna's Archive is some kind of community fork? Idk
They use the sci-hub dump yes. But sci-hub isn't providing new articles so nothing new is sourced from sci-hub.
But given that we know nothing about the person calling themselves "Anna", how can you be sure it's better than Sci-Hub? Maybe this Anna is also living in Russia.
What's wrong with Sci-Hub, anyway? (Other than it not being updated anymore, of course).
anna's archive, one would assume.