Sci-Net

"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.

the point is not to pay researchers (lol), but to encourage uploaders with karma points, while paying for sci-hub infrastructure...

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 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?

It's not really an accusation, just a correction that the SciNet team will likely be making a lot of money even if they don't take a cut of the individual transactions. I think their mission should get appropriate funding so I'm not opposed to the idea as long as it doesn't just end up being a "get rich quick" scheme exploiting the SciHub brand.

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.

[1] https://solscan.io/leaderboard/token