Sci-Net

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.

Send her money in an envelope if you want to pay her.

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.

>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.

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".

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.

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.

> 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

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'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.

the traceability of bitcoin presents a problem in this situation. bitcoin isn't exactly fungible.

>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.

> 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.

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.

How would I know she could collect it?

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.

I agree about Monero, it's anonymous, fungible, and has low fees and high speed.

>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.

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.

>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.

Yup. It's literally the primary use for crypto.