Hacker Remix

Sci-Net

251 points by greyface- 12 hours ago | 110 comments

A_Duck 11 hours ago

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

setgree 11 hours ago

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...

jsheard 11 hours ago

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.

troyvit 10 hours ago

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.

cokeandpepsi 10 hours ago

> 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

Funes- 5 hours ago

>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.

freeone3000 10 hours ago

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.

stavros 8 hours ago

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.

aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago

> 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. :-(

theptip 9 hours ago

Exactly. Whatever your opinions on crypto, it should not be controversial that black market transactions are a perfect fit.

daveguy 4 hours ago

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

beeflet 9 hours ago

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

NoMoreNicksLeft 10 hours ago

>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.

troyvit 10 hours ago

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.

alxfoster 10 hours ago

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.

stavros 8 hours ago

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

immibis 6 hours ago

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.

bawolff 10 hours ago

> 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.

NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago

>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.

beeflet 9 hours ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago

>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.

beeflet 6 hours ago

here's your conspiracy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g

take it with a grain of salt.

tux3 11 hours ago

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.

A_Duck 11 hours ago

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.

logifail 9 hours ago

> 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.

Medicineguy 11 hours ago

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.

beeflet 9 hours ago

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

Retr0id 9 hours ago

> 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)

beeflet 9 hours ago

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.

Retr0id 9 hours ago

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?

beeflet 8 hours ago

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."

eimrine 9 hours ago

Benefiting the system is way more imporltant.

eimrine 9 hours ago

At least rolling their own crypto might give the project their own hosting. But if their crypto is Solana, it does not count.

beeflet 8 hours ago

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.

immibis 5 hours ago

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).

mdrzn 11 hours ago

"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?

Medicineguy 11 hours ago

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.

volemo 10 hours ago

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".

kome 11 hours ago

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

karaterobot 10 hours ago

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."

dns_snek 7 hours ago

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.

karaterobot 7 hours ago

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?

tokai 11 hours ago

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.

krastanov 11 hours ago

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.

yreg 4 hours ago

In case Anna's archive goes down, plenty of people will be glad that SciHub exists. And vice versa, of course.

Maxion 10 hours ago

Because I didn't know of anything better.