
Blackballed by PayPal, Sci-Hub switches to Bitcoin - ur-whale
https://www.coindesk.com/blackballed-by-paypal-scientific-paper-pirate-takes-bitcoin-donations
======
kemonocode
I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my
professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela.

Yes, I know Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies aren't being used by everyone.
Yes, I'm aware of the risks and the costs. But it's still a huge boon as
crypto allowed me to transact _at all_ when it was physically unfeasible to do
so.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until such reality changes: most
people who disregard cryptocurrency as just a fad can afford to think that
way. Their needs are served by traditional banking, and that's fine! But it's
not the reality for an important amount of people who are unbanked for
whatever reason: their past, their actions (whether moral things considered
illegal and thus they're prosecuted, or legal things that society consider
immoral and thus they're censored) or even just a geographical accident.

~~~
Barrin92
I think it's a reasonable solution at the margins as long as the situtation in
countries like Venezuela is as bad as it is. I don't think many people dispute
that.

But as a solution for the institutional failures it still is not a replacement
and obviously the solution in Venezuela needs to be repairing the system.

Same with Sci-Hub in this case. The Bitcoin donations alleviate financial
pressure somewhat, but of course the lawsuits and IP-infringement will still
haunt everyone involved.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
This sort of "Once we've made everything perfect" reasoning doesn't really
reflect reality all that much though; the point is that centralized systems
will always be vulnerable to these problems; even if we temporarily fix them,
that'll be an exception and sooner or later the systems will fall back into
their broken state.

From that premise that the probem is universal, the deduction that the
solution is also not just a temporary fix seems like the only reasonably
conclusiont to me.

I'm not completely sure whether you're arguing that the bitcoin hype will pass
once we've sorted out a few problems, or just that it'd be a nicer world if
that could ever be the case; but either way, I don't think cryptocurrencies
should be a last resort but instead become the norm. Offense is the best
defense, after all.

~~~
Super_Jambo
I would argue that centralization is inherent in most humans instincts. To put
it another way, many people like having a leader.

In fact people like leaders so much that exposed to a capricious and cruel
world they'll invent imaginary and often cruel ones just to give the world a
sense of order. Think the old testament God or lizard people conspiracy
theories.

Given we're going to huge groups of people running around following leaders I
think our best effort is spent trying to make the selection of those leaders
pick non-evil people who run vaguely meritocratic and fair systems. Rather
than trying to engineer ideal de-centralized systems _which will also have to
be robust against the mob following their evil leaders.

Obviously this is a false dichotomy and we can do both, but please don't give
up on good leadership, people need it and there's plenty of examples of it
exiting.

~~~
danwills
This causes such a problem with governance though: Instead of voting for (or
contributing to) ideas/policies directly, you have to translate your
preference into a selection/ranking of the people who sound like they might
support the ideas that you would like to see in your democracy. Sounds like a
pretty crappy codec for that kind of signal tbh.

------
hedora
I usually don’t quote the article, but the last few paragraphs are important
and easy to overlook:

———

Elbakyan says she hasn’t approached any political parties or government
bodies, thinking they could pick up on the censorship argument if they were
interested. She does not believe most people are interested in discussing
freedom of knowledge.

“There is no real community to discuss that, you hardly hear such voices. Not
just in the mainstream media, but even on YouTube, for example. It all died by
2013, when Aaron Swartz died,” she said, adding that even though many people
are using her website or pirate websites such as torrent trackers, few care
how and why they work.

“People don’t think about the [copyright] laws, about doing something about it
or voting against it,” Elbakyan says. “When people reach out to me, they
usually write to say ‘thank you’ or ask how to better donate.”

Sci-Hub’s standoff with the publishing industry is a good fight, Carter (who
is also a CoinDesk columnist) believes. “The law and morality don’t always
match up, and they certainly don’t in this case,” he said, adding:

“Sci-Hub has undeniably made the world a better place, and Alexandra has had
to live as a pariah because of it. Funding her operations with bitcoin
perfectly demonstrates its value proposition.”

~~~
fouc
Is there really no community around "freedom of knowledge"? Why not? How can
we make it happen?

~~~
john4532452
The internet was originally that pre 2010's

~~~
fouc
Touché, we need to bring that back.

------
hirundo
"Alexandra Elbakyan, a 31-year-old freelance coder, neurobiologist and
phylologist, is running a database of over 80 million articles from academic
journals that are normally available only through subscriptions."

A modern Prometheus. Some plinths have recently opened up. A statue of this
woman would make a nice replacement.

~~~
entropyneur
Careful there. Beside this undoubtedly noble deed she has indulged in some
less than impeccable political expression. Meanwhile it looks like a holistic
approach to moral evaluation of statues is gaining traction so it might end up
a waste of copper.

~~~
Funes-
>less than impeccable political expression

According to whom? Care to point us to some of those comments?

~~~
entropyneur
According to me :). But there are quite a few people in Russia who would
agree. It's in Russian, but here we go:

[https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204](https://www.apn.ru/index.php?newsid=36204)

It might be difficult to understand what's so bad without being embedded into
the Russian political context. So here's some more direct stuff from SciHub
social media:

[https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852](https://vk.com/wall-36928352_38852) \-
Stalin quotes

[https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498](https://vk.com/wall-36928352_37498) \-
comparing Stalin to Christ

~~~
st1ck
Not sure why are you downvoted. Without knowing too much about Russian
scientific community, in the first article she doesn't seem to say anything
too bad. But on vk.com she seems to unironically go full Stalin (the guy who
sent thousands of scientists and intellectuals to Gulags).

~~~
entropyneur
TBH, without context I'd be 100% certain that those posts are ironic or just
trolling. Thing is, in that interview and elsewhere she expresses views
typical of other Stalinists, so it's unfortunately not that.

------
cracker_jacks
If there was ever a noble application of the decentralized, uncensorable
technologies ideas bourne out of the crypto community, this would be it.

~~~
RandomBacon
Bitcoin is not uncensorable. Miners have the ability to censor transactions
based on the sender/receiver/amount.

~~~
kim0
If you're interested in a fungible currency, checkout Monero. A true
grassroots cypherpunk project.

~~~
stevespang
Is it true that miners of Monero cannot censor it ?

~~~
RandomBacon
Monero miners cannot see the sender address, the receiver address, or the
transaction amount. I don't know if they finished Dandelion which is supposed
to remove the link between the transaction and the IP submitting it. As far as
I know, without Dandelion, it can be censored by IP address if the people
running the miners are paying attention to that part of the network, otherwise
Monero cannot be censored like Bitcoin can be.

~~~
ajkdhcb2
Dandelion is running now

------
Melting_Harps
> I've also been cut off from most of the traditional banking for most of my
> professional life, and my only crime was being born in Venezuela.

Did you see this:

[https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=p...](https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9aef0f6cb2c0464f7f0b008f918d2d72d80b262d)

Despite the Maduro Regime launching Petro (State-based crytocurrency) they do
not accept it for their official documents, nor do they accept Credit Cards,
they do however seem to accept BTC. Which makes sense because for a time the
Government thugs were raiding Bitcoin miners and taking their rigs and funds.

Alexandra is a total badass, I like her defiant attitude towards Academia as a
whole, and will be supporting her efforts once again this year. Free access to
Scientific Journals is fundamental for a well Educated populace and should be
available to all who seek the knowledge.

What's even crazier is that COVID has shown us that in dire situations, the
walled-garden Peer Reviewed system isn't always best:

[https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-
journal...](https://www.wired.com/story/peer-reviewed-scientific-journals-
dont-really-do-their-job/)

I've seen how petty the peer reviewed system is in the 'publish or die' model
in the Health Sciences, its petty and pathetic to see grown men and women
alike having to resort to such unscrupulous antics to keep up with the
illusion that this is what serves as one of the notable metrics for tenure.

As much as I like SciHub, I hope that her success is measured not by the
amount of domains and servers she was able to maintain, but by her/SciHub no
longer being needed as the paradigm finally shifted.

~~~
tim333
Petro was a bit of a joke I think, mostly seeming to require a transfer of
funds from Venzulean banks and the like to a petro fund presumably controlled
by Maduro or friends and family thereof, in return for petro coins that you
can't do anything much with. Credit cards are I guess blocked by US sanctions.
At least bitcoin works.

------
DoctorOetker
If an advanced alien species popped up, and were to observe humanity today, it
probably would have a hard time understanding why a species would
intentionally cripple its future so hard by punishing violators of
copy-'right'.

It would even be astonished if there weren't any copyright: it wouldn't
understand why empty HDD's weren't 90% capacity preloaded with STEM materials
at the manufacturing plant. The user could always format.

The majority of nations are lagging in the majority of STEM subjects, why on
earth don't they impose a differential STEMpty-ness tax on imported HDD's?
Want to import a drive without randomized sampling of research, current and
historical? pay extra to the STEM drive pot; imported a STEM drive? receive a
little extra from the STEM drive pot.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
There's no open source without copyright.

~~~
praptak
There is no licenses like GPLv3 without copyright. But many others would not
be necessary, as everything would be essentially under a permissive license.

~~~
eythian
This is true, however without copyright I think many other things would change
making the GPL a lot less necessary. For example, no one could prevent you
giving your friend a copy of a program, so the market would change a whole
lot. Basically, the thing about BSD that GPL doesn't like is that BSD permits
proprietary software being created. Without copyright, there isn't really
proprietary software any more, and less of a reason to keep source secret.

(Most of this thinking comes pre-web-applications, that does change the
parameters a bit.)

~~~
praptak
Yes, that's why I mentioned GPL v3.

------
rglover
I hope things like this mean Stripe will bring back Bitcoin support. I
understand why they muted it at the time but it seems like high time to have
their level of engineering backing something like that out in the wild.

I'd love to have BTC options available. Does anybody know of any similar APIs
for doing BTC payments (or accepting cards and having the funds auto-converted
to BTC)?

~~~
DethNinja
Well beauty of bitcoin is that you can be your own payment processor:
[https://btcpayserver.org/](https://btcpayserver.org/)

There are other alternatives available as well.

Main problem is taxes and legality though, right now it is better to sell your
software with fiat money and convert it to bitcoin through personal
investment, at least this way your company won’t be under legal risk due to
accepting BTC.

------
bouncycastle
I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful.

Electricity required to process a single transaction equal the consumption of
18 days for an average US household (source:
[https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-
consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption))

Not only power consumption, these things generate large amounts of e-waste
too, comparable to the e-waste generation of Luxemburg (source
[https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-
monitor/](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/))

It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's
expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of
its value in just a few days)

~~~
1ark
> I like bitcoin but it's hugely wasteful.

Wasteful compared to what?

> It's also terrible to use as a peer-to-peer payment option because it's
> expensive, slow, and the value fluctuates (in March this year it lost 50% of
> its value in just a few days)

It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes. After that you can move it
to a stable coin if you want to be exposed to USD (or gold) instead.

~~~
bouncycastle
> Wasteful compared to what?

Compared to every alternative. Look up the sources I've linked,. the amount of
energy used by Bitcoin is ludacris and unsustainable.

> It's possible to transact in a matter of minutes

10 minutes on average, but that's only 1 confirmation. You'll need to wait 6
before you can ship the goods. Current cost is $0.50 - so both slow and
expensive. (source [https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-
calculator/](https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/))

> After that you can move it to a stable coin

There are no stable coins on bitcoin (that I'm aware of) and you can't use one
nativelly. Even if there are, they are custodial risks involved plus moving
requires another transaction.

~~~
sekai
> 10 minutes on average, but that's only 1 confirmation. You'll need to wait 6
> before you can ship the goods. Current cost is $0.50 - so both slow and
> expensive. (source [https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-
> calculator/](https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/))

Oh boy, wait till you hear about international money transfers.

~~~
bouncycastle
You mean those old telegraphic transfers? Why should I use that?

With my PayPal/Mastercard/GooglePay/ApplePay I can do an international order
in seconds.

~~~
rodiger
Processing != complete. A credit card transaction generally takes 1-3 days to
process. Bitcoin is start -> complete in < 10 mins on average.

~~~
bouncycastle
Nope. 10 minutes for bitcoin is just 1 confirmation. Most exchanges need 3,
but it may take significantly more if you don't put enough fees on the
transaction.

Meanwhile Credit cards/ApplePay/GooglePay/Paypal/AmazonPay provide the tap-
and-go instant purchase experience, even on international orders.

~~~
rodiger
"Tap-and-go" is an illusion, and like I said the payment is not fully
processed for 1-3 days. Low-risk merchants (e.g. under $100) can accept crypto
on 0 confirmations (just checking wallet balance) and accept the double-spend
risk. This is similar to the chargeback risk merchants take by accepting
credit cards (albeit with fewer protections on the crypto side).

I agree BTC fees are high, but for even moderately large transactions (>$25),
it is cheaper than credit card/ApplePay/GooglePay/Paypal/AmazonPay fees.

Edit: and even after processing, chargebacks are often viable for up to 60
days.

~~~
bouncycastle
as a customer, I always like that if something goes wrong, eg. product not
delivered, there's always the chargeback option.

~~~
rodiger
There's nothing stopping trusted 3rd-parties (e.g. mastercard/visa) from
building wrappers to hold the btc in the meantime and mitigate end-user risk
(full circle woo!). Definitely fewer protections from bad-actors with direct
btc transactions, but that's by design (e.g. no _requirement_ for a third
party)

------
LockAndLol
Is the Sci-Hub archive available over torrent or some other P2P system? It
would make it an absolute fools errand to take it down as it would keep
popping back up.

I don't know a single person who actually donates in bitcoin, so it's
surprising to me that she managed to raise 900k in 2018. Bonkers

~~~
sixtyfourbits
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/)

[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/)

It's something like 75TB last time I checked, over 82 million articles in
total. Each torrent contains 100,000 articles, named by DOI.

If sci-hub ever gets taken offline, there are enough full backups out there
that it can be re-instated fairly quickly (at least the archive of existing
articles; the credentials necessary to obtain new ones are not included in
these torrents or database dumps).

------
Causality1
I still don't see how anyone can claim with a straight face that taxpayer-
funded research shouldn't be public domain.

------
oli5679
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and
locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers
featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send
enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling
to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that
scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is
published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published
in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the
work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the
folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s
outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly
legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we
can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge
while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally,
you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling
download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called
stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t
immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light
and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it
to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We
need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy

~~~
mindfulhack
\- I recommend to put the above in quotation marks so people don't think it's
your own comment. Extraordinary quote, here's a copy on github:
[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/ksinkar/4552726/raw/74458...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/ksinkar/4552726/raw/74458d1932510e2b93d8ebde9ac387f842afbc0f/Aaron%2520Swartz:%2520Guerilla%2520Open%2520Access%2520Manifesto)

\- I recommend everyone to watch 2014 documentary "The Internet's Own Boy: The
Story of Aaron Swartz".

We will never forget Aaron Swartz. He did not die in vain. His work lives on,
we are continuing it and will forever.

~~~
oli5679
Only saw this too late to edit but it's a good point. I put source at the
bottom but clearer to put link above and quote marks.

------
raxxorrax
Paypal has been quite prominent in banning people from their service. Some
might deserve it perhaps but I am still against it. Paypal can never be a
universal payment processor.

If they banned real criminal transactions, sure, but I only have seen them ban
people to enhance their image.

~~~
berkes
> If they banned real criminal

This too, is problematic. A private entity should never be the one deciding
what is criminal and what is not.

Especially if they are providing crucial infrastructure.

~~~
ojnabieoot
This is a very stupid thing to argue and I don’t think you actually believe
it. Individuals and corporations are responsible for their _own_ activity and
are responsible for determining if their _own_ actions are illegal.

Nobody is saying PayPal should be the arbiter of law and order or that PayPal
is automatically liable for all actions of their users. But if PayPal believes
one of their customers is using their service to finance criminal activity,
they have a legal duty to respond.

An extreme (but plausible) example is child abuse - if PayPal discovers one of
their customers is using donations to finance child pornography, PayPal
shouldn’t wait for a court order to shut it down. And if they did drag their
feet then some PayPal employees need to go to jail.

~~~
berkes
In your extreme case, it is PayPals duty to inform the authorities. And then
to act upon the instructions recieved from that authority. But it is not
PayPals duty to decide whether the customer is a criminal or not; that is what
the courts or your local version thereof, is for.

It might be that in the US, this is different, but in the EU it is not. In
fact, in the EU, payment providers are, in several cases, prohibited by law to
shut down or inform customers. So if Paypal were to shut down the contract of
such a customer, _that_ would be thing that might bring PayPal employees to
jail.

Now, that is obviously aside from any EULA or other agreements PayPal has with
its customers: as a private entity, paypal is free to put arbitrary rules in
that contract: dissalow stuff that is otherwise perfectly legal, for example.
But that is very different from becoming a judge. Edit: but my point was, that
the moment PayPal becomes "critical infrastructure", such arbitrary rules are
problematic because, if, say, a PayPal account is required to pay taxes or
receive any form of wages, such arbitrary rules will exclude people who then
might get into serious trouble.

Also, please keep the conversation civil. Calling me "very stupid" does not
help to bring your otherwise valid and thoughtful concerns forward.

------
vmception
So although stablecoins exist which are great for predictable commerce (having
a treasury of the amount value you expected), a key piece of the
infrastructure is that Ethereum clients don't work over Tor.

Most stablecoin activity is on the Ethereum network, and the clients have
never prioritized Tor use.

Ethereum also hosts privacy that all fungible assets can inherit, using
Tornado.cash people can trade notes of unknown amounts, redeemable any time.
Using Aztec people can make any token private, and communities can consider
doing private-by-default tokens including with stablecoins if the issuer
started it that way.

So its not as simple as Bitcoin OR Monero. There is a looming large piece of
the puzzle that simply is missing one piece - ease of use over Tor. Layer2
solutions on Ethereum also inherit privacy inadvertently, while solving
scaling issues on layer1.

Of course, sci-hub doesn't NEED Tor itself for donations, being fairly benign,
but as soon as that piece exists, many tech savvy people simply use that
route. Monero will likely remain superior but technically lesser solutions can
solve the actual market needs better, since the attack surface isn't that
consequential.

~~~
Scott_Sanderson
What's the relevance of whether eth clients work over Tor? A wallet's history
would be available on a block explorer like etherscan.io whether the
transaction had been broadcast over Tor network or not. I run a bitcoin node
over Tor but it does not change how any money spent from that wallet is viewed
by the network compared to spending from a non-Tor wallet.

~~~
vmception
It has been trivially easy to disassociate an address from your identity for
half a decade.

You just go from fiat to Monero. And then over Tor you swap or morph Monero to
the surveillance coin you actually want. The centralized swapping service wont
know your IP address due to Tor, Monero uniquely doesnt have transaction
history, and the address you provide for the surveillance coin will be a
virgin one never used before.

So the swapping service and all the blockchain sleuths will be stopped cold.
Actually they wont be stopped they’ll just be following transactions forever
thinking it has the same beneficial owner. So a wild goose chase for people
that think they have purpose in life.

And you get to transact in the digital asset you want.

Unfortunately if that is on the ethereum blockchain then you cant send
additional transactions while over tor.

The desired use case: Anonymously funding a subspace of addresses using Monero
(unstable value), receiving DAI and Ether.

Still over Tor, using the DAI (stable value) to donate to scihub. Using ether
for transaction fees.

Downloading literature from scihub over tor. (Not using bittorrent)

BONUS: we can also get rid of ether transaction fees now, if the dai was
issued directly on a layer2 system like zksync.

So there is a vibrant ecosystem that simply cant broadcast transactions over
tor right now. Its a udp issue. Not irreconcilable, people just havent done it
in the node software.

------
Landmarks
How successful has it been to switch to Bitcoin? I hear mixed things about it
and wonder how many actually use this currency.

~~~
ur-whale
Bitcoin isn't necessarily well aligned to what people usually think of as a
"currency".

It's an entirely new beast in the financial instrument space.

It does bear _some_ characteristics of traditional currencies, but not all of
them.

Specifically, as it works today, and until Lightning gets some traction, BTC
isn't very convenient for small day to day transactions like buying a cup of
coffee.

On the flipside, it does have attributes that traditional currencies strictly
do not have.

For cases such as the OP, there is no other financial instrument on the planet
that will cut it (other than things like Monero / ZCash / MimbleWimble).

Besides being antifragile and censorship resistant, there is also a very
strong case to be made for Bitcoin in the 'preservation of wealth' niche (if
you are strongly insensitive to short-term volatility, and capable of playing
on a 5 year time horizon, that is).

[EDIT]: To answer your question more precisely, Bitcoin has most definitely
been a success story for sites like sci-hub, Wikileak and generally speaking,
people who try to speak truth to power.

~~~
LeoPanthera
There are forks of Bitcoin that solve (most of) these problems and make it
more usable as an actual currency, rather than a gold-like store of value.
"Bitcoin Cash" is the most famous, there are others.

Frankly the failure of "original" Bitcoin to adapt to use as a currency seems
to me to be a total failure of vision.

~~~
ahnick
My understanding of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV is that they have just
increased the blocksize the clients can handle. Is there something more to
them than that?

~~~
zhoujianfu
Not really, but the result is essentially no fees. And thanks to Moore’s Law
there’s no trade-off for it. Bitcoin (Core) is insane for having high fees.

------
louwrentius
And making the plannet a worse place in the process.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-
ele...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-
consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change)

------
chriskanan
Many academics use Sci-Hub now as an essential service, otherwise they cannot
access academic papers unless they are on arxiv or similar sites. Many
universities can't afford Elsevier or Springer-Natures prices. If a university
lacks access then a graduate student would have to pay $30-100 per article. It
is insane. Unfortunately open access is still not sufficient because top
journals are frequently not open or researchers cannot afford the price for
hybrid open/paywall journals to make their paper open access ($1000-$6000 per
paper).

Not a fan of Bitcoin though due to its inefficiency and environmental/energy
costs.

Link to Elsevier open access publishing fees:
[https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data...](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwi234qDr5_qAhUXQ80KHTigAAoQFjAJegQITxAB&usg=AOvVaw3yuBPUj7bUN8mGb1141I4W)

------
hardwaresofton
I've been mulling this over but why don't people who want some consistent
value go with the gold-backed coins? Couldn't tell you which is the best
option, but either people convert or Sci-hub could do the exchange instantly
or at EoW every week or whatever to get away from the volatility but keep the
improved payment.

Financial markets are very volatile right now, but Gold is just about the best
store of value you can have

~~~
lifty
Gold backed coins, like PAX, are very easy to censor. While all the coin
ownership information sits on the blockchain ledger, the gold sits somewhere
in a vault and the custodian company has the capability to blacklist coins.
Virtually all gold backed coins have this issues. You need a native digital
token to have better censorship resistance.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Ahh thanks -- I didn't think of the censorship angle, that's a showstopper for
sure

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Aachen
Is this new? I've been meaning to donate but didn't want to do the whole gdpr-
questionable bitcoin exchange identification thing, so only when Keybase was
taken over I asked a friend to help convert those Lumens into a bitcoin
donation to sci-hub. Glancing through the article, it doesn't sound like
PayPal was an option for most of the last decade now?

I'm also not too thrilled about supporting this super wasteful currency, a PoS
or similar alternative being supported would be quite welcome.

~~~
johnyzee
You can buy bitcoin at 7-11 and CVS now, with only a $5 fee:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-
can-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinharper/2020/06/23/you-can-now-buy-
bitcoin-at-cvs7-eleven-rite-aid/)

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guico
Poor choice of words for this title, especially right now. What about “Blocked
by Paypal”?

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stevedekorte
Is there support for lightning? If so, I’ll donate.

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treebornfrog
They should be using Monero.

Can't be traced by governments (1).

(1).
[https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39](https://images.app.goo.gl/qKDwxvo5Csk913r39)

~~~
akerro
This isn't about tracing or hiding source and/or destination. It's about being
able to donate at all.

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guico
Poor choice of words on the title. What about “Blocked by Paypal...”?

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hellofunk
PayPal is a thorn in our world. They are atrocious and I wish they'd die. The
extraordinary fees they charge for currency conversion, in the form of very
unfair rates, should alone be worthy of their demise, and should be criminal.

------
trav4225
Some relevant TLDR background from the article:

"A self-described Communist in her political views, Elbakyan believes the
paywall policy of science publishing is a kind of censorship."

~~~
iamstupidsimple
Communist but taking donations?

At least she's right on paywall publishing being total bollocks.

~~~
PudgePacket
Just because you have an ideological belief doesn't mean you're somehow
magically exempt from participating in the currently capitalist world. People
still need to purchase food, pay bills etc.

~~~
iamstupidsimple
> currently capitalist world

Plenty of communist countries exist, today. Why not move to utopia?

