Interesting pattern to point out and while its true that specific reports or peices are stuck behind paywalls, my counter example to the truth in general would be that NPR is free.

What other examples of free, high quality journalism do you use?

3

RedArchibald :soros: George Soros 2 hs ago

This author is dumb but he makes a great point. Since the death of local new news media due to the internet the average American's knowledge of the news has stayed the same but the median American's knowledge has been reduced. This is due to a sorting effect where the high interest news consumer have as much access to news as they'd like but low interest news consumers can either opt out of the news stream or just don't come in casual contact with the news as they don't need the local newspaper for its other purposes other than news such as sports, classifieds, etc... Social media has also replaced the casual contact with high quality news someone would receive from typically a local context with feedback loops of extremist low quality bullshit from disparate sources. The only way out of this in my opinion is to find a way to re-bundle high quality local news with aspects of social media without killing the freedom of either.

2

buckykat 4 hs ago

Nathan J Robinson continues to be a lib. Doesn't even make it through the first paragraph without dropping the dreaded "Content"

1

Liber09 :friedman: Milton Friedman 6 hs ago

But to the point of this article, this is why r/politics heavy handed mods being against paywalled content turned that sub into bullshit mountain.

2

SomeoneWithOpinions 3 hs ago

Say what?

1

Liber09 :friedman: Milton Friedman 3 hs ago

My comment was poorly worded. R/politics limited paywall content so in return people would flood it with free to read garbage. Including stuff the author of this piece cleverly leaves out, trash from jacobin, the intercept, etc.

2

Liber09 :friedman: Milton Friedman 6 hs ago

I think it’s funny he admits the paywall is necessary and talks about his experience running a magazine—trying to pay people a reasonable income but then tells other industries their work should be free.

3

honeypuppy 6 hs ago

My personal experience regarding paywalls is that there isn't really anything I'd want to justify spending $50+ a year on, and I can't really be bothered signing up for free trials and the like most of the time. Also, my attention tends to split amongst a number of sources, and I'd rather not subscribe to them all.

I'd be quite happy with a user-friendly pay-per-article model. This would be especially good for paywalls for sites I'd never subscribe to but really want to read an article. I'd be happy to throw in $0.20 or so to read that one article I was curious about.

1

EvidenceBasedOnly :george: Henry George 8 hs ago

Is there a better source than currentaffairs?

5

computerbone Yesterday

The most actionable part of this article is about academic journals. The public already pays for this information. Journals need to die.

14

CorentinMoran Yesterday

I'm especially uncomfortable with the fact that this buys into the increasingly pervasive idea that people aren't critical consumers of information. If someone is reading a bad source uncritically, removing the paywall from a good source won't help them much.

1

Smirking_Basilisk Yesterday

120+ Upvotes :thinkingemoji:

1

Geminii27 Yesterday

"The truth is also lies. But it comes with a free frogurt!"

1

tinyLEDs Yesterday

You get what you pay for.

New world, same as the old world.

4

UncleWeyland Yesterday

One point this article fails to mention is how utterly worthless most paywalls are. A brief Google search will often yield easy go-arounds. Even if the paywall is relatively well implemented (like WSJ) there are ways to mitigate the financial cost, such as sharing a subscription with friends.

The advantages to be leveraged by this information is also not entirely clear.

It's also worth mentioning that even in the era of paid newspapers, the powers that be (say WR Hearst) weren't above misleading the masses right into a war, or promoting dubious theories like Pauling's Vitamin C Cures Everything hypothesis.

The real way to sort through the garbage is by using what cannot be bought- inate intelligence, critical reasoning, experience, and a good position in the cultural social graph (eg all the clever fellows who made out like bandits on the recent Kodak pivot... you weren't gonna hear about that from the WSJ prior to it happening).

1

zkredditz 3 hs ago

>One point this article fails to mention is how utterly worthless most paywalls are. A brief Google search will often yield easy go-arounds Are you sure this is not on purpose? While the site wants the subscriber income, it also wants its articles to be read, linked to, liked, and commented on. By making it somewhat inconvenient, but not impossible, they can get some (if not necessarily the best) of both worlds.

1

chunes Yesterday

My sentiment about the web hasn't changed since the nineties. I am perfectly fine without web pages being monetized. I liked the web better when people hosted pages about things they were interested in because they wanted to.

If a lack of monetary incentive results in there being less "quality" on the web, that's a trade I am wholeheartedly willing to make.

However, from what I've seen it's quite the opposite. So many people throw together these monolithic abominations solely because they see a way to make money from it, and not because it produces any value.

19

oelsen Yesterday

> So many people throw together these monolithic abominations solely because they see a way to make money from it, and not because it produces any value. That's true for so many other things.

6

tmlbl Yesterday

the new york times

truth

ok buddy

1

Fake_William_Shatner Yesterday

You either pay for your content, or your content is SPONSORED, or you are the product being sold.

I think if I got paid more, I'd be paying for local news and reporting -- a fair sum.

But, since that isn't going to happen, this whole "selling us dog food" system is working out for the people not paying a living wage. "Hey, you know if we have single payer -- it's gonna cost more!" We learned this from think tanks that get paid by companies against single payer.

10

wholetyouinhere 1 h ago

The same think tanks whose content gets posted from time to time in this very subreddit. And when I rightly complain about it, the response is always the same: "what, specfically, about this piece is wrong?" Like I'm supposed to dedicate hours of my life debunking propaganda every time someone posts it, instead of users just *not* posting propaganda and focusing on the insightful content that's supposed to be here. Sorry, massive pet peeve.

1

shinramyun247 Yesterday

Yep! Look at medical journals!

6

duffstoic Yesterday

Phenomenal article, as usual from Robinson. Thanks for sharing it here.

1

TracingWoodgrains Rarely original, occasionally accurate Yesterday

> as usual from Robinson Eh, not so much. I've had very little respect for him since [his run-in with Scott a couple years back](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/10/response-to-current-affairs-on-against-murderism/) where he badly misrepresented Scott and then backed away from further dialogue. Julia Galef summarizes a large part of my feeling [here](https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/972583264887042048): > When Current Affairs first came out, I liked it & enthusiastically recommended it to ppl. But since then, I keep seeing Nathan Robinson (the editor) harshly criticize someone, and then I follow up on it & realize "Wait a minute, he totally misrepresented their position" He's a talented writer, and I appreciate that he's at least open about his biases, but those same biases mean that he treats conversations more like wars and is willing to use dirty tricks if he thinks it will advance his cause. This article was remarkable in that, because he managed to present an issue I fundamentally agree with him on in packaging perfectly designed to repel all but his political allies, by (among other things) choosing only examples that flatter his worldview, including [junk research](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i2z7i5/the_truth_is_paywalled_but_the_lies_are_free/g081ol4/) as Scott points out above. Robinson is skilled at what he does, but deserves neither respect nor support for it. Even for good messages like the core of this one, there are much better champions to be found.

1

ff29180d Ironic. He could save others from tribalism, but n 8 hs ago

[Scott isn't exempt from dishonest behavior in this case.](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/)

1

TracingWoodgrains Rarely original, occasionally accurate 2 hs ago

Could you elaborate on what’s dishonest about Scott’s behavior there? I feel like he covered his bases pretty well and made a useful, clear point. You could talk about the sarcasm being unbecoming, perhaps, but when the piece you’re responding to is a set of convoluted thought experiments intended to prove that “libertarian principles are psychotic,” I feel like it’s hard for you to lower the discourse more than it’s already been lowered (happy though I may be to see arguments against libertarianism, which I don’t particularly care for). What was wrong with Scott’s response?

1

ff29180d Ironic. He could save others from tribalism, but n 2 hs ago

Pretending natural-rights right-libertarianism, Austrian School right-libertarianism, Objectivism, etc. is a fringe minority that only a weakmanner would want to argue against and all right-libertarians who matter are consequentialists ? Misconstruing "coercion by private entities" as meaning McDonalds employees doing no-knock raids in body armor looking for marijuana ? Claiming requiring logical consistency from philosophies to be equivalent to thinking “Suppose there’s an evildoer who punishes all evildoers who do not punish themselves. Does the evildoer punish himself, or not?” mean moral nihilism is correct ?

1

TracingWoodgrains Rarely original, occasionally accurate 36 mins ago

A leftist like Robinson should certainly be aware of the dangers of excessive generalization of political movements. He mocked libertarianism as a whole, which unsurprisingly prompted libertarians and adjacent people who *didn’t* fit his rough categorization to defend themselves. The easy solution there is precision. If I say “socialists support evil dictators like Stalin and Mao”, plenty of irate socialists will object, just as another crowd rises to defend them and accuse me of believing imperialist propaganda. Robinson didn’t care to make the distinction, so defenders shouldn’t be obligated to sort out just how many fit his category versus their own. Scott hangs around a lot of libertarians who fit his description, and very few hardline Objectivists etc. It’s not a surprising objection for him to make when Robinson comes in with a “checkmate, libertarians!” The rest seem like examples of weak argumentation, not dishonesty. I don’t expect them to be seen as thoroughly convincing, but I don’t see anything there to suggest it wasn’t an honest response to Robinson’s broad generalizations.

1

ff29180d Ironic. He could save others from tribalism, but n 16 mins ago

Nathan Robinson seems like he would call the followers of Milton Friedman neoliberals instead. And it is not true that there aren't any "hardline" (followers of Robert Nozick, Ludwig von Mises, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, or Ayn Rand) right-libertarians in the rationalist community. Bryan Caplan is as hardline as you get and he gets cited a lot 'round those parts, for example. Neoreactionaries are an offshoot of Austrian-school anarcho-capitalism. And there are quite a few Objectivists and other hardline right-libertarians on rattumb.

1

duffstoic Yesterday

That link strikes me as a really long conversation that I don't have the time or interest to get into. I've read dozens of Robinson's articles and have consistently found them to be extremely charitable and reasonable, so I find your argument unpersuasive.

1

PlasmaSheep once knew someone who lifted Yesterday

You won't read the argument, but you find it unpersuasive anyway?

1

TracingWoodgrains Rarely original, occasionally accurate Yesterday

I mean, yeah, an argument typically isn't going to be persuasive when you start out disagreeing and aren't interested in examining the backing evidence. If your politics are similar to Robinson's, I imagine his regular bad faith would be less obvious because he'd typically be attacking people and things you feel deserve it, but it remains there for those who care to look.

1

duffstoic Yesterday

I would love to have hours and hours to read long arguments and have long conversations with internet strangers. In fact I did that many hours a week in my 30s and have decided it is a complete and utter waste of time because in the end, no one really changes their mind on anything. I am unsurprised that these two intelligent people disagree on things, as their politics is wildly different, and that they were unable to resolve their disagreements. I am also unsurprised that a follower of Scott's would disagree with Robinson and accuse him of things like acting in bad faith, which strikes me as a wildly inaccurate accusation, because I do in fact basically agree with Robinson on most everything. But on and on it goes, nobody changes their mind or even opens it a little, just futile typing into the void from across our tribal borders.

1

TracingWoodgrains Rarely original, occasionally accurate Yesterday

> I did that many hours a week in my 30s and have decided it is a complete and utter waste of time because in the end, no one really changes their mind on anything. This is as cynical as it is wrong. Minds don't change in an instant, sure, and some things are fixed, but perspectives can be refined and deepened without minds directly changing, and given time and patience major shifts aren't unrealistic. Believe me when I say this isn't empty talk: [One of the most pivotal decisions of my life](https://old.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/72x6ip/update_you_convinced_me/) was enabled in part by long conversations with the few internet strangers who disagreed with me on a *very* highly charged issue but were willing to be charitable and thoughtful about it. [One of my most productive and meaningful academic experiences](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/04/acc-entry-does-the-education-system-adequately-serve-advanced-students/) came when someone who thought I was silly and wrong on one of my core passions drilled down with me for endless hours about where and why we were both wrong, and we walked away having produced something useful from it and with much greater understanding than when we came in. If you haven't ever changed tribes or really changed or opened your mind on anything, that's fine, but let me suggest from personal experience that plenty of us *have*. As for Robinson's bad faith, one paragraph from the article you don't care to read but do care to vocally dismiss is a sufficient starting point: > Nathan writes that “shockingly, the people who most loudly call for empathy and dialogue are the least willing to engage in genuine empathetic dialogue…”, and uses me as an example. I can only say in my defense that last month, I sent Nathan an email saying that I thought it would be productive to engage in dialogue with each other in a way “where instead of trying to disagree publicly, we’re trying to come to agreement privately, then present the results of that agreement”. I offered to do this with him on a topic of his choice. He wrote back saying he didn’t have enough time, which is fine. But when he then publishes an article in a national magazine announcing that I am a hypocrite because I refuse to dialogue with my political opponents, I feel pretty betrayed. A bad-faith actor being on your side does not stop them from being a bad-faith actor. I don't accuse [Jeffrey Sachs](https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/), [Carl Bergstrom](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom), or Contrapoints of acting in bad faith, despite them occupying a similar political sphere, because they haven't earned that label. Robinson has, and if you are willing to cheer him as a face of your movement then you will provide people a very good reason to oppose it at least in part.

1

speckz Yesterday

Submission statement:

I get why paywalls exist. Good writing needs to be financially supported, but one of the most significant consequences is that we now live in a world where journalism is behind a paywall while rumors & disinformation are free-flowing. QAn*n becoming mainstream is just the beginning.

"It costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free."

22

AutoModerator Yesterday

Remember that TrueReddit is a place to engage in high-quality and civil discussion. Posts must meet certain content and title requirements. Additionally, all posts must contain a submission statement. See the rules here or in the sidebar for details. Comments or posts that don't follow the rules may be removed without warning.

If an article is paywalled, please do not request or post its contents. Use Outline.com or similar and link to that in the comments.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

JustALittleGravitas Yesterday

Weird article, since it admits the paywalled sources aren't actually good.

It then tries to reconstruct the argument with an example of an article downplaying the threat of SARS2 while the refutation is paywalled, but one of the paywalled sources (Washington Post) published several similar takes, the best that can be said about them is that they were from Febuary not March.

4

HiImTheNewGuyGuy Yesterday

> Weird article, since it admits the paywalled sources aren't actually good. Weird comment, since it straw mans the article more than a little bit. > but one of the paywalled sources (Washington Post) published several similar takes Yeah, so that one example definitely means that the paywalled professionals are no better than Fox News, right?

11

JustALittleGravitas Yesterday

No it means that it's no better than The Hoover Institute or CNN or Bloomberg or any other non paywalled source that did the exact thing the article is using as an example of misinformation.

0

bvimarlins Yesterday

Why do you think the source considers the paywalled sources "not good"?

4

JustALittleGravitas Yesterday

Because I actually read the third paragraph.

0

bvimarlins Yesterday

[X] Doubt

0

JustALittleGravitas Yesterday

funny how you totally reversed your opinion on this >Did you stop here or did you read the next paragraph where the author talks about all the problems with those sources

2

bvimarlins Yesterday

...man you really do struggle with reading comprehension.

1

PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN had a qualia once Yesterday

I've never found a piece by Nathan J. Robinson that I suspected of being intellectually honest. If you're reading this and you know of one that might fit, please link it.

1

ksa10 Yesterday

I never heard of this person before but just reading this article left a funny taste in my mouth. Far too sneering and self congratulatory to me. And to steal a comment I read on HN: Has anyone noticed how this article is free?

1

ohisuppose Yesterday

That was a complete waste of time. He never fully commits to either position, does his typical call-everyone-racist schtick, and ends up patting himself on the back for encouraging people to check his for-profit book out at the library.

1

jalanb Yesterday

I did like this

one could almost construct a serious newspaper purely from material culled from the New York Times

OTOH: After reading that, I'm glad I'm a coder, where all the good stuff, is free.

OH: And thanks also to The Guardian for "adopting a different model".

3

GodWithAShotgun Yesterday

I appreciate the premise of this piece; current economic incentives make low-quality information easier to obtain than high-quality information. I find the details and potential solutions rather lacking.

Specific responses are formatted as:

paraphrased claim/argument from the article. Quoted parts will be in quotes: e.g. "Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying."

Commentary

"Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying."

I agree! I might be biased, but I liked scott's piece on this more since it seemed a more thorough exploration of the problem of paywalls that didn't hurry to a solution.

Many high-quality news journals require subscriptions. Many low-quality sites do not.

I agree! Quality writing is costly, so it needs to get funded somehow. I agree that this is annoying in and of itself and that it leads to further problems down the line.

I will say that beyond this point, the agreements will get sparser.

NYT is misleading readers: they describe immigrants as 'pouring in'

The author seems to be privileging a particular policy. As a result, analogies or frames that lead to an interpretation of events which in turn lead to policies they disagree with are "misleading". If the author thinks these interpretations lead to bad policies, they should say so outright instead of saying they're misleading.

Academic writing is behind paywalls.

I read lots of academic writing and do not use institutional access to do any of it. Over 99% of the time I have no issue getting an article for free in under 30 seconds. 1% of the time I could probably email the author, although to be honest I usually don't bother. If academic writing is your "even worse" example of inaccessibility of high quality content, I lower my credence in your argument.

"In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the 'free market,' let us briefly picture what 'totally democratic and accessible knowledge' would look like."

Let's assume that the US government, as it currently is, takes this project on. Let's assume, further, that there are no scaling issues involved in putting literally all knowledge created by mankind into one searchable database. I mean, google can do something close to this so at a minimum it's possible.

I imagine it would turn out somewhat similarly to the library of congress - an existing entity that seems to have somewhat similar aims. I think the library of congress is pretty cool - it has lots of high quality stuff and it's all free!

So, how would this actually look? I searched for "War and Peace" since it was the first book that came to mind. It took ~10 seconds to come up with a list of things, and seemed to be sorted kinda arbitrarily. The first entry was a painting, and the book I was looking for was the second. I clicked on it, it took ~5 seconds to load, and then asked for login credentials I don't have.

If porting all of human knowledge into the library of congress didn't break the website or the economic activity that spurs the creation of its content, then it sounds great! What sorts of economics does the author expect this will result in?

"[U]niversal free access to full content horrifies publishers..." "The creators of content are horrified by piracy, too." "I realized, though, as I was recommending everyone get my book from the library rather than buying it in a bookstore, that my publisher probably didn’t appreciate my handing out this advice. And frankly, it made me a little nervous: I depend for my living on my writing, so if everyone got my book from the library, it wouldn’t sell any copies, and then my publisher wouldn’t pay me to write any more books."

Sounds like it wouldn't work great as-is, what fix does the author propose to keep everything humming?

We have our universal public knowledge database, and anyone who wants to can type in the title of any of my books and read them for free.** But the number of people who read the book is tracked, and I am compensated two dollars for every person who reads it (a pittance, but that’s about what authors get for their sales).

I'm sure this won't be abused.

Even when you fix the obvious bugs, this is a giant goldmine of abuse. The US government is bad at fixing loopholes for abuse: look at the tax code. It's miserable, unwieldy, and despite everyone hating it and wanting it fixed it usually gets worse.

But let us note a few facts: first, dead people cannot be incentivized to be creative, thus at least everything ever created by a person who is now dead should be made freely available to all.

Quibble: This is one fact and one policy proposal. The author seems to keep confusing these.

I'm in favor of intellectual property getting released into the public domain sooner than the current system: certainly mickey mouse should have been in the public domain a while ago. The caveat: Intellectual property pays dividends over time, frequently years after the work is produced. Suppose someone with a stay-at-home husband and kids abruptly dies of an aneurysm at 35 immediately after publishing their magnum opus. Their spouse should retain the intellectual property for a while to reap the rewards of their spouse's work and minimize the economic disruption from their death (10-20 years? Those are the first numbers that came to mind after ~10 seconds of thought).

Spotify does something like this, but it's exploitation.

I'm confused. Is this a good system, or a bad system? As I mentioned above, significant rewards for use-of-work are likely going to result in wide-scale abuse. Spotify's "exploitative" incentives already result in abuse. Ramping up the rewards will only ramp up the abuse.

"The question of how much productivity would be inhibited by the state declining to enforce the copyrights of academic journal publishers and Getty Images must be weighed against the phenomenal unleashing of human productive power that universal free access to all human knowledge would create."

We basically already live in the world where everything is at our fingertips. Maybe it's just because I'm exceptionally good at searching for things, but I rarely encounter academic paywalls I can't get around with minimal effort. Commercial works certainly have more paywalls, but I feel that those paywalls are primarily problematic in the domain of news/policy discussions. The CA example about coronavirus or Scott's example of some WSJ article that was supposedly-good come to mind.

Hopefully not too CW of a take (happy to edit this bit of commentary out if it crosses a boundary): This seems like typical Socialist utopian thinking; that somehow the problems involved in significantly modifying incentives will be nonexistent but the benefits will be enormous. The actual outcome of this policy is unsubstantiated speculation on the part of the author despite being the crux of the piece. "Wouldn't it be great if you, individually, had unfettered access to all human knowledge?" Yeah sure, but not if it means breaking other important things when I basically already have that.

Left good, right bad.

This seems tangential to the author's broader point.

"Hopefully someday our patchwork of intentionally-inefficient libraries will turn into a free storehouse of humanity’s recorded knowledge and creativity."

Our libraries are intentionally inefficient? That is a bold citation-less claim. The author wants to create a library that contains everything ever made but thinks that libraries are bad at what they do? I'm confused.

we're good, the right is bad

Again: seems tangential, but okay.

"I wish I could give my book to everyone too but my publisher won’t let me."

"I realized, though, as I was recommending everyone get my book from the library rather than buying it in a bookstore, that my publisher probably didn’t appreciate my handing out this advice. And frankly, it made me a little nervous: I depend for my living on my writing, so if everyone got my book from the library, it wouldn’t sell any copies, and then my publisher wouldn’t pay me to write any more books."

30

Sinity Yesterday

> I'm confused. Is this a good system, or a bad system? As I mentioned above, significant rewards for use-of-work are likely going to result in wide-scale abuse. Spotify's "exploitative" incentives already result in abuse. Ramping up the rewards will only ramp up the abuse. I think the criticisms against *Spotify* system mostly don't make any sense. One might discuss how much of a cut Spotify should get, or how much subscription should cost - but overall, it's a win-win. Assume people would pay as much into *the industry* as they'd've paid by purchasing albums (on average). But what they're getting is not a few tracks, but simply access to ~~everything. *The amount of money paid is the same in that case*. Now, as I said, subscriptions might be too cheap. But the system *itself* is sane. As opposed to newspaper paywalls for example. Or "traditional" content distribution. Which simply ignores the possibility of access to everything to consumers. It'd be really great if *everything* switched to Spotify model. *And Spotify itself was technically better*. --- I also think that claims of artists being hurt by the current implementation are mostly crap. I listen to plenty artists with monthly listeners/streams in the 100K-range. They wouldn't *exist* probably, at least not for-profit in previous models. It's mostly complaining by super-popular "artists" who get *smaller cut now since people diversified their attention*.

1

fell_ratio Yesterday

> Our libraries are intentionally inefficient? That is a bold citation-less claim. The author wants to create a library that contains everything ever made but thinks that libraries are bad at what they do? I'm confused. Libraries are good at lending out a limited number of copies of a book. But why does a library lend out limited copies of a book? This gets more absurd when you look at libraries which lend out eBooks. They can't have too many copies lended out at a time.

1

elgrecoski Yesterday

Sounds like libraries could use more exemptions from IP law.

1

fell_ratio 2 hs ago

That's essentially what he's advocating for. A public library which can lend out unlimited copies of any work, plus a system for compensating authors after we destroy their source of income.

1

2

3

2

4

2

2 2

2

1 4

2

7 2 2

Nabugu 3 days ago

Just to inform you newcomers in crypto, there have been dozens (yes, DOZENS) of these same exact “decentralized crypto helping science” projects since 2016-2017. Every single one have failed and filled the definition of a scam, with value of the coin going to zero within months. You can always say “well not this one”, but the stats are not on your side. If the value of the coin is central to the future of the project, it’s a red flag. You can do open research without crypto.

1

iamquoted 2 days ago

This is very interesting to me. Could you tell me about some of the other dozen projects that tried this and failed? I happen to be working on an open research platform (currently without crypto) called AsOne ([https://asone.ai](https://asone.ai)), and I want to know more about the pitfalls of a cryptocurrency-backed approach.

2

joycesticks 1 day ago

Here’s a website dedicated to keeping tabs on the blockchain projects attempting to solve problems in science: https://www.blockchainforscience.com/ While personally I don’t agree with u/Nabugu’s perspective, it is definitely representative of how many people (especially in science) feel about the ICO bubble of 2017. I don’t remember many of the projects that raised significant funding via a token sale pertaining to science though. In many respects, the blockchain industry as a whole has matured significantly since 2017. Back then, projects were raising 10s of millions of dollars simply with a landing page and white paper. A lot of people participated in these sales solely for their “get rich quick” potential. Now the space has more intelligent investors, and established security regulations to help police the lower quality projects. Anyway, your website looks pretty neat - just signed up ;). Thanks for sharing it!

2

iamquoted 1 day ago

Thanks for all the information and for signing up to AsOne! I started AsOne to be like “Reddit for research”, and since ResearchHub is like “GitHub for research”, I kind of see the two as sister websites. :) I‘m rooting for ResearchHub and hope we can help each other flourish!

2

Nabugu 2 days ago

To sum it up, those crypto “projects” that end up being scams usually amounts to becoming a printing press for a coin that you will sell to people (an ICO), giving them the prospect that “once the project will gain steam”, the coin will be worth more (because people will need to use it to participate in the project). Therefore, speculation can entice them to buy the coin. Sometimes, there is pump, and then most surely a dump of the price, and nobody gives a fuck anymore, and your reputation is ruined because of this scammy outcome. Those scams had their golden age in 2017 (and not just for science, for everything you could think of). But I guess people forget, or just didn’t know at the time so here we are again.

1

iamquoted 2 days ago

It seems ResearchCoin isn’t doing an ICO, though? From the third page of their whitepaper: “These coins will be distributed solely as rewards for contributions on the ResearchHub platform. ResearchHub Inc. will not be hosting an initial token sale of RSC.” It doesn’t seem to match the pattern of a pump-and-dump scheme, at least.

2

CryptoMods Bronze 3 days ago

Thank you for submitting to /r/CryptoCurrency,

Your post has been removed because there are already 2 posts about this coin on the front page.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

Cullyn 3 days ago

The scientific record is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and in ivory towers. Science should be open; not only for reading, but also for reusing.

ResearchCoin ($RSC) is the incentive within the ResearchHub network designed to encourage open participation in the scientific community.

After over a year of development, ResearchHub is proud to announce that ResearchCoin has officially been launched onto the Ethereum Mainnet!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

1

Cullyn 3 days ago

The scientific record is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and in ivory towers. Science should be open; not only for reading, but also for reusing.

ResearchCoin ($RSC) is the incentive within the ResearchHub network designed to encourage open participation in the scientific community.

After over a year of development, ResearchHub is proud to announce that ResearchCoin has officially been launched onto the Ethereum Mainnet!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

1

AutoModerator 3 days ago

Ethereum(ETH) Basic Info: Website - r/Ethereum - Abstract - History - Exchanges - Wallets

Biases(Updated July, 2019): Arguments For & Arguments Against | CryptoWikis: Policy - Contribute Content

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

Cullyn 3 days ago

The scientific record is too important to be hidden behind paywalls and in ivory towers. Science should be open; not only for reading, but also for reusing.

ResearchCoin ($RSC) is the incentive within the ResearchHub network designed to encourage open participation in the scientific community.

After over a year of development, ResearchHub is proud to announce that ResearchCoin has officially been launched onto the Ethereum Mainnet!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

1

uvizhe 3 days ago

Hi, How is it different from Orvium, for example?

2

AutoModerator 3 days ago

Thank you for your submission, but due to the high volume of spam coming from Medium.com and similar self-publishing sites, /r/Technology has opted to filter all of those posts pending mod approval. You may [message the moderators](/message/compose?to=/r/technology&subject=Request for post review) to request a review/approval provided you are not the author or are not associated at all with the submission. Thank you for understanding.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

3

3 3

10 2

willdocrazyobs4btc redditor for 5 weeks 9 hs ago

Why does this have only 59 upvotes??? u/statoshi done already fourth round of metal storage tests and gets less upvotes than some kid cheering about bitcoin price going up/down one hundred bucks?

1

willdocrazyobs4btc redditor for 5 weeks Yesterday

Great work as always!

I've made my own safu.ninja storage and it's awesome. I've also labeled each tile with number as the creator have here - https://safu.ninja/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/safu1-scaled.jpg

One word per side of each tile too, same as you're suggesting with a couple extra ones to shield the sides. All marine stainless steel. It was a bit fiddly to stamp the words but definitely doable.

Also, if you keep the tiles tight (using spanners), the pressure test wouldn't damage the bolt at all, IMO.

As I said, great work and thank you for including a DIY solution among the commercial ones. Your blog is awesome and I always spent hours on it. Thanks a bunch!

3

maxcoiner Yesterday

Stamping those little washers sounds like a recipe to send washers flying. Is this something you can realistically do without a vice grip or shop? (i.e. is it apartment friendly?)

2

willdocrazyobs4btc redditor for 5 weeks 9 hs ago

You don't need a vice. All you need is a solid metal base under the tile/washer and a metal hammer. Hit it hard! It'll fly only if you hit your hand. The hammer will too, right after. Don't forget to stamp the number too. One word each side of the washer, plus one blank washer at both ends of the bolt to protect the stamped tiles.

2

BubblegumTitanium Yesterday

!lntip 100

1

lntipbot Yesterday

Hi u/BubblegumTitanium, thanks for tipping u/statoshi **100** satoshis! *** *[^(More info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/lntipbot/wiki/index) ^| [^(Balance)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=balance&message=!balance) ^| [^(Deposit)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=deposit&message=!deposit 10000) ^| [^(Withdraw)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=withdraw&message=!withdraw put_invoice_here) ^| ^(Something wrong? Have a question?) [^(Send me a message)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=drmoore718)*

1

BubblegumTitanium Yesterday

Hey /u/statoshi great write up I always enjoy reading these.

One problem I have with this methodology is the corrosion benchmark.

It’s good in the sense that it compares the products to each other in a fair and quick method but it doesn’t actually tell you how each product would perform in different scenarios.

If a certain product passes the acid dip someone might think that the product would fare well at the bottom of a deep lake with still water. Which is also different to getting rained on then dried, over and over for many years. Which is also different to being in the beach where there is salt water.

The mechanism for corrosion that occurs is different depending on the circumstances, I’m sure a bitcoiner such as yourself can appreciate the nuance that occurs.

The cypher wheel and the safu product look cool but there would be water buildup in between the pieces with no drainage so the water would lose oxygen and that can create some gnarly corrosion depending on the situation even if it’s stainless steel.

Also the safu might actually be different metals (washers+bolt+nut) which can create an electric potential between them that exacerbates a particular corrosion mechanism. One way to avoid that is to put plastic (in marine applications nylon is often used) separators between the bolt and the washers and in between the washers. The load that is applied on the nut might also cause corrosion in different ways.

It may or may not be a problem depending on the situation and if there is corrosion it may or may not end up destroying the information that you’re trying to preserve.

I don’t want to freak anybody out but it can be a problem if you’re planning to store these for 20 years in a place where it can get wet. I also don’t want to make it seem like I think this is invalid, it just doesn’t tell the full story with regards to corrosion (and I’m not sure that OP meant to try to do that anyways).

To add some credibility to my statement I have a degree in materials science and engineering and have worked in the marine industry doing product testing. I can say that some environments are very unforgiving in unexpected ways.

1

tlztlz 1 day ago

Thank you!

For the rest of the world who don't know how much 2000 Fahrenheit is, here I googled it for you:

1093.333 degrees celsius

2

Skreech2011 1 day ago

Okay, I don't know shit about Bitcoin. Why would you need these products? What's the purpose?

1

statoshi 1 day ago

https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/why

3

Secret_Operative redditor for 2 weeks 1 day ago

When you create a bitcoin wallet, you can make a 12 or 24 word recovery seed. There is a standard, BIP-39, that draws from a ~~1024~~ 2048 word list where all of the words are unique for the first four characters. The entire standard is open source, well documented, and easy to implement. Practical use includes if you lost your bitcoin wallet and wanted to restore it, you just re-make the new wallet using your 24 word seed.

4

Skreech2011 1 day ago

Huh, well all right. So it's literally a string of words used for recovery of your wallet if you were to lose access to it? So, then, why not use a password manager or something like that to keep track of your seed rather than a physical medium? Or is the physical medium for security purposes?

2

Secret_Operative redditor for 2 weeks 1 day ago

> why not use a password manager or something like that to keep track of your seed rather than a physical medium? Great question. It's more secure. You should never enter your wallet seed into any electronic device like a phone, TV, computer, laptop, tablet etc. It could be someone is monitoring your device, or has hacked it, or will hack it in the future. You can't hack a steel plate.

3

Skreech2011 1 day ago

Wow. Well all right. Crypto currency is wild, man.

3

jcoinner 1 day ago

The main thing here is being fireproof. You can write your seed words on paper and that's fine as long as you don't have a house/office fire. This gives that extra bit of protection.

2

statoshi 1 day ago

It's a bad idea to keep sensitive material such as this on an internet-connected device. Doing so opens you up to a wide variety of attack vectors.

9

heggen 1 day ago

This is great information. Never thought about it that this small letter plates could fall apart out of the slots on heavy stress. So this kind of wallet is not a solution for me

1

rapierce0238 2 days ago

All great info, I would love to see a video series on each one.

2

bitusher 2 days ago

!lntip 10000

Excellent round of testing !

2

lntipbot 2 days ago

Hi u/bitusher, thanks for tipping u/statoshi **10000** satoshis! *** *[^(More info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/lntipbot/wiki/index) ^| [^(Balance)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=balance&message=!balance) ^| [^(Deposit)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=deposit&message=!deposit 10000) ^| [^(Withdraw)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=withdraw&message=!withdraw put_invoice_here) ^| ^(Something wrong? Have a question?) [^(Send me a message)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=drmoore718)*

1

ughdf 2 days ago

Interesting. Keep up the good work.

1

1 2

YeOldDoc 2 days ago

This is a cozy bedtime fairy tale to tell newbies, but it is also incorrect. With the exception of support by Core developers, there wasn't any majority support of UASF in any group:

0% of hashrate supported UASF
~5% of economic actors supported UASF
~13% of full nodes supported UASF
~50% of Core devs favoured a UASF

Node count is inherently flawed as a measure to gauge "user" support: Bitcoin XT had similar node shares as UASF once. Bitcoin Classic has had larger shares than UASF once. Bitcoin ABC had once a share twice as high as UASF.

Yet node count for UASF is often treated as "the will of the users" while the others are treated as sybil attack.

It should also be noted that UASF was originally not aimed at users, but at economic actors (businesses accepting Bitcoin, exchanges, wallets, ...). From the UASF FAQ:

if the economic majority agree to run code that rejects non-signalling segwit blocks.[...] If a large part of the economic majority publicly say that they will adopt this new client, miners will have to signal bip9 segwit activation in order for their blocks to be valid.

Especially noteworthy is that the UASF FAQ explicitly warned

that users do not update [to UASF] unless an economic majority commits. [...] BIP148 requires support from the economic majority, particularly exchanges and wallets.

But UASF failed to secure significant support from businesses which started signing the NYA instead, which claimed to represent the economic majority that UASF aimed for:

58 companies, including 14 exchanges
5 billion USD of monthly transaction
80% of hashing power
20 million bitcoin wallets

At this point UASF had no hashrate (0%), only minuscule support from economic actors (5%) and very few nodes (2%).

Then the UASF propaganda was kicked into overdrive:

Companies are now bad for Bitcoin because they collude in "backroom deals" and prepare "corporate overtake" of Bitcoin (note that this happened in an atmosphere where miners and Core devs continued to fail to produce a viable solution)
UASF is now not only about activating Segwit but taking a stance against evil companies
The economic majority is now about running "full nodes" instead of companies/exchanges/wallets.
Sudden increase of UASF node counts and hats. So. many. hats.

UASF node count continued to rise but never exceeded 13%. Many suspected those nodes to be either fake or run in the cloud. People cite "almost 15%" as a clear sign of a significant "grassroot movement". In comparison, Bitcoin Classic and ABC had 34% and 27% at their highest peak. (Note that all of them had significant amounts of instances run on cloud VMs).

The only metric in which UASF gained any significant support from any group at all at any point in time was support by Core developers: ~50% were in favour of UASF while all of them were against S2X.

In the end, UASF's goal was achieved (i.e. SegWit activation without blocksize increase) despite its activation (BIP148) having no effect (BIP91 locked in SegWit before). (You have to ask miners if the threat of UASF or the S2X bribe was the driving force.) This led people to become UASF supporters "in hindsight":

Wearing a UASF hat then meant: "I support threatening a minority chain split in order to force activation of SegWit."

Wearing a UASF hat now means: "I support Core. Also: Users should have more say than 'companies' in the strategic development of Bitcoin".

It is difficult to assess the UASF support in numbers at that time, especially with regard to the number of people supporting UASF without running a corresponding node.

But it is important to note that UASF did not have any significant support on any known metric and no majority in any metric at any time during the "blocksize war".

This creates a difficult situation for UASF supporters which claim that UASF is the one and only cause for Segwit activation:

Either

a minority of users with
a minority of nodes and
a minority of economic actors and
a minority of hashrate

or

50% of Core developers

is sufficient to significantly alter Bitcoin's future against the wishes of the community.

The easiest escape from this dilemma is doing what the linked article does: Claiming that UASF had overwhelming user support, but the numbers simply don't support that. It's just a lie to make users feel in control.

1

2

2 2

6 3

funnybitcreator 2 days ago

lol. Great release name!

1

BlammyWhammy 3 days ago

Is this multi-part payment just paving the way for automatic Atomic Multipath Payments (AMP) or are those happening now?

2

almkglor 3 days ago

Multi-part payment is what the "base" variant of "Atomic Multipath Payments" is called now. So yes, we are getting AMP, it's called MPP now.

6

sumBTC 3 days ago

v0.9.0: Rat Poison Squared on Steroids

5

funnybitcreator 2 days ago

Best release name ever.

1

pox435 3 days ago

!lntip 200

1

NimbleBodhi 3 days ago

Thanks!

1

lntipbot 3 days ago

Hi u/pox435, thanks for tipping u/NimbleBodhi **200** satoshis! *** *[^(More info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/lntipbot/wiki/index) ^| [^(Balance)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=balance&message=!balance) ^| [^(Deposit)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=deposit&message=!deposit 10000) ^| [^(Withdraw)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=withdraw&message=!withdraw put_invoice_here) ^| ^(Something wrong? Have a question?) [^(Send me a message)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=drmoore718)*

1

Cryptoguruboss 3 days ago

Yuge?

2

BubblegumTitanium 3 days ago

Yes. This with a coldcard in hsm mode, a properly configured OS, and good physical security is actually pretty damn solid. I think you can still get dossed as per what the protocol allows but very hard to steal utxos.

1

MrRGnome 3 days ago

Does any other lightning node expose a PSBT signing interface?

I think I'm going to install c-lightning and play with this.

6

WeirdHovercraft 3 days ago

lnd has it as well. https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/psbt.md !lntip 11

4

lntipbot 3 days ago

Hi u/WeirdHovercraft, thanks for tipping u/MrRGnome **11** satoshis! *** *[^(More info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/lntipbot/wiki/index) ^| [^(Balance)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=balance&message=!balance) ^| [^(Deposit)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=deposit&message=!deposit 10000) ^| [^(Withdraw)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=lntipbot&subject=withdraw&message=!withdraw put_invoice_here) ^| ^(Something wrong? Have a question?) [^(Send me a message)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=drmoore718)*

1

2

Stay up to date on all things crypto and blockchain

Select

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

© 2020 Token Daily

Stay up to date on all things crypto and blockchain

Select

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

Check out the white paper on Researchhub!

© 2020 Token Daily

🙌 Login to Token Daily