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.
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.
You'd think that Venezuela would have provided incredibly fertile ground for bitcoin usage to go mainstream.
But what actually happened is good old fashioned dollarization. U.S. dollar banknotes flooded into the country. As for digital payments, Venezuelans have repurposed Zelle, the U.S-based person-to-person payments option, to make digital U.S. dollar payments.
I wonder how hard it would be for a bank to try to become nationally available by explicitly serving the people (firearms manufacturers, pornographers, and immigrants from high-risk countries, among others) who are inappropriately mischaracterized as “high risk” despite having good books.
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.”
"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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
I find it interesting that humans always assume alien behavior would be exactly the behavior that they believe is the best behavior for humans. We can't project our ethics on to aliens, there are an infinite number of evolutionary strategies that may develop. Aliens may view enslaving the majority of their fellow species and keeping them uneducated as ethical because it might make for a more efficient structure. More likely, all of their concepts would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to us.
Anyway, putting STEM material on every computer wouldn't do anything because the barrier isn't the availability of knowledge, it's that most people aren't interested in that information. 99.9% of human knowledge is easily available online, just as easy if not easier than opening a file on a HDD. That's not to say that SciHub isn't necessary, because it is and I use it all the time.
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)?
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)
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
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?
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.
I mean, the Sci-Hub transactions are real criminal transactions and PayPal is 100% in the right to ban them. It isn’t about “enhancing their image,” it’s about protecting them from significant legal liability.
This isn’t to say that Sci-Hub should be illegal and I am very sympathetic to the argument that scientific research should not be copyrighted. But it is clearly breaking the law as written.
It's weird/dumb how everything is privatized now. Communication? Zoom! Except if you want to talk about Chinese oppression. Facebook Messenger! But it doesn't let you send piratebay links because "it's a link to a site that might be harmful to your computer". Google! Except if you upload stuff to YouTube and some "rights holder" thinks you stole from them, you might get banned from your whole Google account...
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.
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.
As the article points out, Sci-Hub relies on bitcoin for international donations but the majority of its donations come via Yandex.Money, a Russian version of PayPal. I guess that means that most of its donations come from Russians and other CIS nationals with access to Yandex.Money.
Most of the time, they are suitable for standard payment amounts, but they can spike to quite high levels that make only large amounts worth transacting. This is due to network capacity limitations.
Furthermore, anyone that does not wish to hold BTC - understandable due to its significant volatility - must convert it again into the preferred currency.
Fees = friction, and there's enough friction now that people will only use it when it provides some significant utility.
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.
Coinbase has 30M+ users. Extrapolating from that I'd say roughly 100M people use Bitcoin to some extent, and it's growing pretty rapidly (20% growth on /r/bitcoin subscribers this year). Using means storing or transferring value in Bitcoin.
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.
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
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.
[+] [-] kemonocode|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prepend|5 years ago|reply
Digital money is awesome, it being taken over by so many carpetbaggers is not.
I’m looking forward to bitcoin having a stable value for a few years, any value.
[+] [-] jpkoning|5 years ago|reply
But what actually happened is good old fashioned dollarization. U.S. dollar banknotes flooded into the country. As for digital payments, Venezuelans have repurposed Zelle, the U.S-based person-to-person payments option, to make digital U.S. dollar payments.
[+] [-] microcolonel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oricle|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hedora|5 years ago|reply
———
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
A modern Prometheus. Some plinths have recently opened up. A statue of this woman would make a nice replacement.
[+] [-] entropyneur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cracker_jacks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomBacon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Melting_Harps|5 years ago|reply
Did you see this:
https://preview.redd.it/29lg5g19dr651.jpg?width=762&format=p...
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...
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hedora|5 years ago|reply
The series is about a sci-fi dystopia. Unfortunately, most of their predictions have come to pass. That episode is particularly relevant.
When it aired, it seemed absurd that we would cripple our future by punishing people that freely disseminated educational materials.
I guess I’m old enough to play the part of the “advanced” alien species in your hypothetical.
[+] [-] metrokoi|5 years ago|reply
Anyway, putting STEM material on every computer wouldn't do anything because the barrier isn't the availability of knowledge, it's that most people aren't interested in that information. 99.9% of human knowledge is easily available online, just as easy if not easier than opening a file on a HDD. That's not to say that SciHub isn't necessary, because it is and I use it all the time.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xeeeeeeeeeeenu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedwolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglover|5 years ago|reply
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)?
[+] [-] bouncycastle|5 years ago|reply
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)
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/)
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)
[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Causality1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oli5679|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
If they banned real criminal transactions, sure, but I only have seen them ban people to enhance their image.
[+] [-] ojnabieoot|5 years ago|reply
This isn’t to say that Sci-Hub should be illegal and I am very sympathetic to the argument that scientific research should not be copyrighted. But it is clearly breaking the law as written.
[+] [-] berkes|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] netsharc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JasoonS|5 years ago|reply
Also you can use tornado.cash for example over Tor. Or any dapp via something like metamask (or another wallet) over Tor.
[+] [-] mirimir|5 years ago|reply
That's always bothered me. It also amazes me how much clients seem restricted to smartphones and Chrome.
[+] [-] Scott_Sanderson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Landmarks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpkoning|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|5 years ago|reply
Most of the time, they are suitable for standard payment amounts, but they can spike to quite high levels that make only large amounts worth transacting. This is due to network capacity limitations.
Furthermore, anyone that does not wish to hold BTC - understandable due to its significant volatility - must convert it again into the preferred currency.
Fees = friction, and there's enough friction now that people will only use it when it provides some significant utility.
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Geee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uoylj|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] retube|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdinsn|5 years ago|reply
100% of cyber criminals use Bitcoin, that's a lot of people!
[+] [-] louwrentius|5 years ago|reply
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-ele...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chriskanan|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|5 years ago|reply
Financial markets are very volatile right now, but Gold is just about the best store of value you can have
[+] [-] Aachen|5 years ago|reply
I'm also not too thrilled about supporting this super wasteful currency, a PoS or similar alternative being supported would be quite welcome.
[+] [-] johnyzee|5 years ago|reply