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
But it's a bit of an endless chore for a person to do, there are always more requests coming. It helps one person, but it doesn't really feel like efficient use of your time when it's a drop in the ocean.
I'm not thrilled with the crypto token thing, but it's good to see new things being tried. The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, there's not much to fear from this particular initiative. The worst they can do if it turns bad is... publish scientific articles.
There's still a good argument for sci-hub to stay fully non-commercial. Let's see where it goes.
It's not clear if Sci-Hub themselves stand to make any money from this. If they do, the worst that can happen is that their incentives are distorted from being a highly-regarded community resource to maximising the number of manual uploads.
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 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).
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.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If its useful for that, then presumably it would also be useful to giving traceless donations to criminals, since that is effectively the same thing.
Hence seems like the right tool for the job.
One would think that, but these sorts of tricks don't always scale down to the level of paying someone a buck to get a copy of this week's Nature. When you pay a Senator $6million in bitcoin to get something through committee, there's also the unspoken truth that you can pay someone else $150,000 to go suicide the pesky journalist poking his nose into that business... not so with microtransactions. Though bitcoin still has fractional amounts small enough (looks like 1 satoshi is about a tenth of a cent?), it seems as if the fee for sending that is nearly a dollar itself. The only people who would be rewarded would be ASIC miners siphoning off stolen electric power from some third-world hydroelectric plant.
Theoretical bitcoin from 2009 is not the same thing as real world bitcoin in 2025, and hasn't been for a long while.
The Sci-Hub meme coin does not take privacy and untraceability very seriously, thus potentially putting lots of its user in danger. :-(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
take it with a grain of salt.
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.
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.