> These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community.
I'm going to send this to everyone who I know is involved in crypto/blockchain.
Yeah, most people in sanctioned countries are victims of their own governments. Please punish them more by not allowing them to send and receive money that their lives could depend on. Cryptocurrency helps remove at least a little bit of that pain for many families around the world.
> I'm going to send this to everyone who I know is involved in crypto/blockchain.
I bet you've complained about people trying to talk you into cryptocurrency, and you didn't like it. It's annoying and you'd be doing the same.
I don't think we spend a country worth of energy to run data centers which support the financial system around the world.
A top of the line supercomputing center needs 4-6 megawatts of energy, cooling and utilities included. CERN's main power supply is around 12-15 megawatts IIRC. Bitcoin network needs as much energy as a mid sized European country, which is way bigger than this number.
A normal bank data center probably needs 1-2 megawatts at most, on the other hand.
That's the power aspect.
On the other hand cryptocurrencies are slowly started to being regulated, so they'll be divided to legal and illegal ones. So money laundering will be no different regardless of the medium/currency you use.
It's the cat and mouse game part. Cryptocurrencies are trying to go against systems which are built over centuries, if not millenia.
Iranians trying to get cash so they can buy groceries are not the problem. North Korea using ransomware to get lots of cryptocurrency they can use to fund their nuclear weapons program is the problem.
Either the money is permissionless or it isn't. If everyone can use it that means people you don't like can too. Like the internet. If I can send packet to my friend with a message then so can a terrorist.
Do you really want to turn SourceHut into an instrument of US foreign policy, even if it keeps Iranians from buying groceries? US foreign policy doesn't have a great track record on human rights or diminishing global inequality, you know. It's killed and imprisoned a hell of a lot more people than North Korea.
Posting on a throwaway for obvious reasons that you'll see in a minute. In general, I smiled reading the news. Scams, fraud, and absurd energy waste have given crypto such a ridiculously tainted image.
But I think the sanctions evasion line is silly, personally. I may have a controversial opinion here, but I think sanctions avoidance is one of the few legitimate uses of crypto.
Sure, North Korea benefits, but so do plenty of other normal, everyday people. For example, I went to university in Siberia for a few years, and so I know a ton of Russians. Quite literally, out of my entire department, I can think of, maybe, two people, at most, who are in favor of the invasion of Ukraine, or, at least, don't see it as black and white as most others (and fairly understandably so, given one of them lived in Donetsk until a couple of years ago; of course things aren't going to be as black and white when the military has been shelling you for years).
Despite the fact that no one is happy about the war, they all must suffer the consequences of it [1]. As an example, in Russia, all men under 27 can be called up for conscription. One way to avoid it is to do military training during university (basically their ROTC equivalent). Normally this has been a relatively "good deal" for years; you spent one day a week for a couple of years doing training, and at the end you're an officer and avoid spending twelve continuous months in the actual military, whilst never getting called up to serve. So, I have a handful of friends who made that choice. One of whom recently got accepted into a study abroad program, but due to the sanctions would've been unable to pay the dorm fees as there was no way to legitimately transfer the money. Shortly afterwards, the news broke that Russia would begin calling people up in the reserve, like him, to serve.
Surely it doesn't make much sense, if we actually want peace, to be complicit in sending young people who aren't in favor of the war to go die invading someone else's land?
I have seen little evidence that sanctions work. Even using North Korea as an example, it's not like they've stopped their weapons program [2]. My view is that:
- sanctions are ineffective.
- sanctions by far hurt the average person the most (and that's the point: they are meant to cause instability to the point of revolution unless the leadership stops doing whatever it is they are doing -- except this neglects to take into account that most of these sanctioned countries will also supposedly murder you over the smallest grievances, so....).
- sanctions cause many who'd normally be against the government to gain sympathy for them after suffering at the hands of those sanctioning them.
Sanctions avoidance is good! I am tired of seeing people from countries that cannot unify over things as 'minor' [relative to genocide, etc] as public transport and healthcare to expect a hundred million people to unify against a totalitarian dictatorship when they could simply, you know, not risk dying. The expectations people have of people like Russians et al are absurdly and irrationally high.
I am especially tired of the virtue signaling coming from people whose countries have been responsible for the deaths of millions in the very regions we act so concerned about -- e.g., West and East Asia. There is an irony in acting as if sanctioning North Korea is for the Koreans when the Korean war [a US-Soviet proxy war] resulted in the deaths of millions of Koreans. There is an irony in sanctioning Syria and Iran for 'peace' while Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are irreparably damaged due to wars and invasions by the same countries which have sanctioned them.
As an Arab, it may be petty [3], but it boils my blood seeing the "Save Ukraine" flags on half the damn sites and GitHub projects I click on. The IDF has killed so many Palestinians, yet we continue to fund Israel. Yemen is at the brink of starvation, yet we fund the Saudis who kill them. Iraq and Afghanistan are destroyed, yet we invaded them -- HELL, not only did we invade them, UKRAINE WAS PART OF THE COALITION THAT INVADED IRAQ, yet I am not meant to hold any resentment.
It makes me so angry. I am sick and tired of the ONLY time Europe and the Anglo outposts seem to care about 'peace' and war being when their white brethren are killed. Fuck your sanctions, man. I could not care less about the agenda of your governments; the US military is the largest, most well-funded terrorist organization in the world.
[1]: I am sure someone will read this and think "this is what you get when you elect XYZ". However, I find the logic beautifully ironic, given a year ago, you'd read how one cannot protest in Russia without getting detained, beaten or killed, and yet now we expect the average Russian to throw away their life just to get arrested or worse. These people have just as little control over their circumstances as most Americans did during the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, if not less.
[2]: As a side note:
- A: Why would they ever stop? The US backed out of the Iran deal because Trump was, well... Trump. When Gaddafi agreed to stop the Libyan weapons program, the US funded the very rebels that overthrew Libya and sodomized Gaddafi with a bayonet before brutally executing him. What sane person would EVER trust the U.S. and Europe to hold their words regarding weapons programs when time and time again, it has been shown that words mean nothing. Nuclear weapons are the only way for North Korea to ensure they have a future as a country.
- B: Why should they stop? If nuclear weapons are not the defensive necessity that North Korea claims they are but instead, simply a global threat, why does to the US, France, UK, etc, get to keep their nuclear stockpile?
[3]: I should be clear. I don't support the war in Ukraine. It hurts my heart listening to the parents who've lost their children, and vice versa. But I am petty in the sense that I am jealous: I am so deeply saddened by the fact that places like Poland nearly caused a political crisis in the EU by refusing Arab refugees, despite being part of the coalition that invaded Iraq, yet the moment Ukraine gets invaded, Poland offers to take millions. Like fuck you, if you want to talk about bearing responsibility for your actions, fuck you, bear some responsibility.
Like, yes, amazing, I am happy; that is a GOOD thing. But Jesus Christ if that doesn't make me feel worthless as a human being, what should? It feels like confirmation that simply due to my ethnicity, my life will NEVER be valued the same as a white man. I am so sadden by the fact that the whole world cares about these situations, yet cannot be bothered to care about their own damn war crimes.
I moved to the United States as a child shortly before 9/11. I will never forget the way we were treated afterwards. I will never forget being in school and having the teacher inform us about the Turkish kid who'd be enrolling next week, and having the little white kids initially react with excitement and curiosity, come back the next day and play a game where they made imaginary traps for the Turk, talking about dumping their imaginary boiling hot coffee on him, etc. These are children. Who taught them that way? Their parents. Children aren't like that naturally.
I am tired of the most hateful countries in the world acting so concerned about others.
My father is not a terrorist, yet when my father returned to Israel while studying in Germany, simply due to the fact that he ran the Palestinian student union at his university, he was detained. They claimed he was a member of the PLO, and tried him as a terrorist, and held him in Israeli prison for two years. He never got to finish his degree.
To this day, despite being an Israeli citizen myself, when I go through the Ben Gurion airport I am assigned a 'six' in the first digit of the barcode they place on my passport -- the "secret" security rating they give you, on a range of 1 to 6, with 1-2 being common for most Israeli citizens, and 6 being the highest level of threat.
When my grandmother was sick and at the end of her life, we returned to Israel. After she passed, upon trying to re-enter the United States, they found out about my dad's false terrorism conviction, and he was, of course, denied entry. I was 10, and I was told I'd see him again in six months, and that we'd figure things out. I didn't get to see him again for another 8 years.
When I first saw him again as an adult, I was so happy, but it was the most bittersweet feeling in the world. When you communicate with someone over Skype on a 480p webcam for years, it hides the wrinkles in their face. I cried and cried and cried all night that first night -- I was so happy but I was so sad; he looked so old. I didn't realize how old my father was. I felt robbed by the universe; it wasn't my mother's fault, it wasn't my father's fault. I was just unlucky.
I know I am rambling, but the point is: really, if anyone actually cared about the morality, why do countries like Israel get away with ruining my life? Why do countries like the US get away with killing millions? These sanctions aren't here for peace, they are here for someone's political agenda, and that's all.
--
Anyway, I know my schizoposting anti-American ramblings are not helping my cause whatsoever, but I am very upset. I shouldn't be this upset, but I don't know why, I think it was just the straw that broke the camel's back tonight. I am very exhausted.
I guess the last thing:
To anyone who reads this and thinks "what a nutter - it's probably a good thing they watch people like him and deny them entry" -- sure, maybe. But remember: my feelings of resentment were not something I was born with. I am a child of American and European foreign policy.
99% of crypto/blockchain projects give the rest a bad name, so I especially like this part:
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
looking forward to seeing what (if any) crypto projects there manage to meet this standard.
PoW is the only way to secure a decentralised ledger. It's literally the magic that makes it valuable as money. Thank God it'll never move away from Proof-of-Work.
I forget the actual source of this quote that I am about to mangle, but:
Bitcoin/Blockchain was designed specifically to circumvent the legal frameworks used
to regulate financial transactions. It follows then that any non-fraudulent use of
these technologies is the exception, not the norm.
Blockchain currencies are designed to avoid being regulated. I am not saying that all
of the current regulations are _good_, but irreversible "anonymous" transactions are
always going to be attractive to fraudsters.
Can anyone elaborate on this? Cryptography course at my university covers blockchains and we were never made aware of this. And academic community in general seems to be unaware, not a single blockchain talk I attended drew attention to this.
elaborate on what specifically? There are plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad. If you took a CS course, likely people were invested themselves or do not see it that way, f.e. if they either care about making money or a libertarian idea of freedom which sees government as bad, and needs 'uncensored' money.
I took courses with focus on theory, performance and security of blockchains. I never cared much about the practical situation, and all those things Drew criticizes blockchain for. Blockchain is a cool thing from TCS perspective — end of story for me.
I'm actually teaching a course in Cryptography right now that touches blockchain a bit. And I asked this question with a practical purpose to know if there are any warnings I should give my students about practical implications of the technology.
> elaborate on what specifically?
> plenty of academics talking about blockchain = bad
Elaborate of what is "bad" specifically, and suggest any specific trustworthy academics who made any statements like that.
From an academic cryptography perspective, blockchains (as opposed to just Merkle trees, as found in lots of useful things like Git) are an interesting and valid solution to the problem of constructing a shared distributed ledger with no trusted party.
From a non-academic perspective, the trouble is there are few or no real-world problems for which such a thing is the best solution (judged by logistical practicality, performance, or ethics).
A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people.
So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn't true.
> Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity.
I’m really curious to know where this statistic is coming from. Spend a day following other sources [0] and you’d be hard-pressed not to come to the same conclusion.
$14B in illicit activity in a year sounds like a lot, but it's about a single percent of $1T, and Chainalysis is tracking $1T worth of transactions per month in crypto.[2]
WTH my man, not just Tornedo(Or whatever) and such are criminal, but any fraud or scam in crypto should also be considered criminal.
And I know atleast 5 banks with over 1 Billion in cap, went down. Not sure how that's not over 1 percent my man. But sure hell there are issues with Crypto as it stands.
Also I can for certain say more than 1 percent of fiat is used in illegal stuff. Not sure how crypto is doing so much better... When all I hear are stories of Hacks, Frauds and Rugpulls.
You can also use GNU Taler if you just want zero knowledge and mostly permissionless...
> Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people.
Sadly, this echoes the kind of defective reasoning I have observed with a majority of “crypto” proponents.
Also, without a proper source for a claim, I can just as well state that research has shown that less than 1% of cryptocurrency proponents are aware enough to realize the hole they’ve dug themselves in.
I'm not a Sourcehut user (yet), but the more I hear and read about it, the more it seems like the creators and owner(s) care.
Glad to read this. The whole topic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has become a good marker to identify companies that actually care about their users, technology, and the product they build.
Another good example here would be the (highly skilled) devs over at Valve [1]. Not just when it comes to cryptocurrencies, but many other things they do as well, like having the steam deck (mostly) open and Linux based, which would probably cause violent reactions from devs at most other companies. (Let's hope they never decide to become a publicly traded company...).
On the opposite end we have the corporations and devs who just chase after the next buzzword to run after investors and to appease her holiness, the stock market.
What I am trying to say is that a clear pattern has emerged when it comes to different companies and their approach to "blockchain technologies".
My comment is undoubtedly an oversimplification, there are tons of things to criticize Valve for. Microtransactions are a plague unleashed by them, for one.
I was mostly trying to keep the comparison limited to the topic of cryptocurrencies, and the behavioural patterns observed in tech companies when it comes to them.
My point was that it’s easy for them to ban cryptocurrencies and NFTs while saying that it’s for the good of the users, while they themselves keep supporting almost identical things on their platform. They only difference being that Valve gets a cut of the non-NFT transactions
That's not the only difference, it's not even the most significant difference. The difference is you don't own anything on Steam. Just like you don't own anything digital you buy on Amazon. If they want to revoke your ability to access content you paid for, they can and do.
In principle (not always in practice), crypto protects you from that.
True. But blockchain tech changes absolutely nothing about that in the realm of games and media, having a flag in a decentralized database does not protect me from a (game) server owner banning me, a drm system choosing to ignore said flag, or shutting down the whole game and refusing distribution. In these situation only piracy would help, and we don't need snakeoil for that.
In the end there will be a centralized entity with the power to deny my access.
Neither do cryptocurrencies change anything about this in the realms of finance as long as their complete existence builds on top of banks and exchanges, which it very much does.
Cryptocurrencies are not an alternative, they are an addon at best.
It's not a magic wand. It facilitates new decentralized systems, it doesn't somehow fix the old ones.
You're assuming a world where digital content is administrated and supported by a centralized organization. If they stop respecting the license, it becomes worthless, no one can argue otherwise and no one is trying to.
A world where digital content is administrated by anyone (including by the user themselves) and interops with other services (games, social apps, or otherwise) does not see the assets suffer or lose value when one such service shuts its doors. They can just be taken elsewhere. One game goes down, a fork goes up, etc.
Blockchain does absolutely nothing to fix what's broken with today's systems, it provides the infrastructure for the alternative.
> The difference is you don't own anything on Steam.
Doesn't matter, because people still trade CSGO skins that they technically don't own for thousands with each other. As long as one account has something limited that can be transferred to another account, they own it. Even if the ownership is shaky as hell and dependent on corporate overlords.
What's wrong with in-game cosmetics as a funding model? They don't purport to be a stand-in for currency or anything useful at all, and thus are purely for cosmetics. What's worse is buying something that does matter to the game AKA pay-to-win; compare to Diablo where you pay to beat other players.
This is just a "pay what you want" model in disguise, and not surprisingly some people pay nothing and will face no competitive disadvantage in the game.
B) This is not "pay what you want" it's "pay what you want for gambling". You can buy those items, but not from the developer directly. From the developer you can buy the privilege of gambling for what you want. You can only buy them directly if they allow a secondary market.
C) My initial point had nothing to do with whether it was good or bad. It was that Valve already had proto-NFTs in several of their games.
This is disappointing. I'd previously been a big fan of the sourcehut model.
I can understand not wanting to be associated with the billions of tinycoin ICO scams or NFTs that are just URL links or whatever else.
But to reject things like Bitcoin or Ethereum seems to me to be a denial of reality. Just because it's not useful for you, doesn't make it not useful.
For clarity, I will be affected by this change and I don't at all believe my code is socially negative, but I'm not interested in justifying myself. My favourite ice cream flavour is not yours.
In the end, Git is decentralized and running cgit or whatever is pretty simple stuff. I just had high hopes for sourcehut.
On a long enough timescale I suppose anyone lets you down.
There is nothing wrong with you being disappointed, but it is important to clarify that disappointing you does not mean that the service disappoints others.
After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with people having different ideologies, and that must apply to companies too - either the ideology of the owners/operators, or the jurisdiction they reside in. And considering how the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are indeed just vehicles of scam and speculation, I find it perfectly reasonable to just have to send a short message to give a heads up that you are indeed the 1 in a million case worthy of exclusion. Talking to people is not the end of the world, and I doubt it would take more than a short message.
That a project using proof of work is bad does not meant that a project using proof of stake is good. The ban is cryptocurrencies, and that PoW cooks the planet for no benefit is only one of the listed reasons behind it.
It's wasting huge amounts of precious resources, often from buying out old, unclean and otherwise decommissioned powerplants to make it extra bad. All with no immediate benefit. Even if Bitcoin was Proof of Stake, it's still a pretty "eh" technology.
The best thing that happened to Bitcoin was when it got banned in China so that the mining capacity was vastly reduced, taking part of the environmental footprint with it. Can't wait for others to do the same.
Maybe new Blockchain products will pop up that do something interesting without being a significant contributor to global warming and lung cancer by massively increasing unclean power usage - but maybe not.
No it isn't. If that energy is cheap enough to be used for securing Bitcoin then it can't have been used for something "useful" (in your opinion). Energy isn't fungible and transport costs exist. The immediate benefit is securing and making possible an open, permissionless digital financial system anybody can use. That is an absolutely stunning technological innovation. Proof of stake is the perpetual motion machine scam here.
The massive amount of stranded hydro that Bitcoin was soaking up in China, when mining was banned was that energy magically teleported to NYC to power people's TVs and dry their clothes? No, it's now sitting there unused with no buyers of last resort. In fact, that being sitting unused is now subsidising the fossil fuel mining by lowering the relative mining difficulty.
Mining is responsible for a rounding error in emissions, if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't even make a detectable dent.
Fossil fuels are bad. Fossil fuels being used for mining is bad. That doesn't make Bitcoin bad.
Sure, when we have a 100% renewable grid where Bitcoin neither takes away renewable quota, add dirty energy, cause grid to have to expand, or causes issues when TWh of heat is vented, and it is then adopted for legitimate reasons and not primarly for speculation and scamming, then Bitcoin goes from extremely harmful to mildly interesting.
Yes there are cases where they buy good power plants, but they also power from grid and buy dirty power plants. Even in case of good power, the investment should instead be made to make this power useful. Heck, folding at home or similar would be a hell of lot better usage.
But that isn't where we are. We're in a huge energy crunch, and having to go back on green policies because of it. During this time, ANY consumption is bad, and no, regardless of opinions on its usefulness, Bitcoin does not yet contribute in a meaningful enough way to sacrifice other utilities.
So yeah - I agree with you that we can waste power when and only when the vast majority of dirty power has been replaced.
"ANY consumption is bad" You really aren't getting this are you. Energy in place A can't be magically transported to place B where it's needed for what you bless as acceptable usage. Bicoin miners aren't using grid energy. They're using energy that CAN'T be connected to a grid. Bitcoin is a fantastic use of energy regardless, just because YOU don't need to use it or think so doesn't make that the case.
2. Some miners - mostly China, which is no longer mining - buy decommissioned power plants and mine "off the grid".
... But, surprise surprise, these decommissioned power plants were previously used. People generally do not invest in building power plants that cannot connect to the grid, as the power plant needs to make money. While it never became a thing in the US, energy trade is a big thing in the rest of the world - see e.g. the European Energy Exchange.
The people that tripped over a hydroplant that was built only to power e.g. a remote factory that has shut down and nothing else, account for a very, very, VERY small amount of miners.
Considering that Bitcoin mining consumes TWh in the scale of a small country, those few fairy tale cases just don't matter. It's a cute way to try to justify the environmental disaster Bitcoin mining is, just too bad it doesn't hold.
This may be an axe you want to grind, but it doesn't seem pertinent to the actual statement from Sourcehut. They don't say they're terminating crypto projects because of the environmental aspect. They're terminating them because they're often fraudulent. According to this statement you could be bad for the environment, but not be a platform for fraud, and appeal to Sourcehut and be reinstated.
I personally am a fan of Drew's work and pretty skeptical of crypto, but this announcement makes me feel that Sourcehut is too small and attached to the preferences of one man for me to host anything significant there.
Yes, and thereby those that cause them to keep running (e.g., Bitcoin miners).
If we had abundant clean energy everywhere with no unclean power plants, then knock yourself dead. But right now, any power consumed has an unclean component.
Even if you use power in a country that is 100% renewable, it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy. And that these miners buy old crap power plants make it worse - it reverses grid-wide improvements to green energy.
... heck even with fully renewable energy for the entire globe, wastefully burning energy so that more renewable power sources need to be deployed is still bad - no power plant is neutral to manufacture.
And re: comparison to call of duty, if had the same footprint as Bitcoin, then we could start talking. Bitcoin consumes power like a small country, not like someone forgetting to turn off the lights. All for something that can be done without any of this power draw.
You shouldn’t refer to other commenters as deluded.
It’s pretty clear the GP means a demand curve: cryptocurrencies induce demand for energy sources that would otherwise be uneconomical to operate. This doesn’t require fungibility.
And that's only a problem if those energy sources are fossil fuels. Demand for renewables is a fantastic thing. Bitcoin is a pioneer species, it will use that energy when there's literally no other economically viable use.
> And that's only a problem if those energy sources are fossil fuels
Okay, but the 'if' there is true. Bitcoin is currently inducing demand for coal and gas plants, which is very bad. It's unclear when it'll stop doing that, if it'll stop, and a hypothetical future in which Bitcoin starts incentivizing the good thing instead of the bad thing doesn't change the truth value of the current bad thing.
(We've also fixated on coal burning, when there are oodles of other great reasons to not like Bitcoin. A small handful of them have been listed elsewhere in this thread.)
Bitcoin isn't going away. More people are putting their trust in it as their monetary standard every day, not less. Bitcoin, the asset and network are neutral. Scams on top of it, shitcoin affinity scams, or whatever "oodles of other great reasons" don't change that. The majority of Bitcoin mining is already renewable, it already incentivises renewables this isn't a hypothetical future.
If somebody proposed a law tomorrow that bans coal plants being reopened to mine Bitcoin I wouldn't be against it, and Bitcoin would carry on happily regardless.
BUt you're then getting into the dangerous territory of telling people what and what isn't an acceptable use of compute power. Bitcoin is a valid and useful consumer of energy.
This is a polemic. I don't have a stated position on whether Bitcoin is or isn't going away, and we've completely drifted away from the factual matter at hand (that Bitcoin does currently incentivize coal burning).
If Bitcoin is neutral as you say, it cannot incentivize renewable production. It can only induce energy demand and, consequently, seek out the cheapest energy on the market. It doesn't get to sit on any laurels for that, any more than car manufacturing or aluminum refinement would. Except, of course, that those actually produce things.
Bitcoin mining secures hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people going back to the very first transaction. It produces security, a forcefield around a financial system, and the miners get paid to do that.
For one, quantity: video games don’t use as much electricity, and those that do aren’t incentivizing reactivation of old fossil fuel plants.
For another, necessity: we have a preexisting financial system that secures orders of magnitude more value than cryptocurrencies do, with actual legal guarantees and recourses.
For a final, civic harm: whatever limited negative social ills can be explained by video games are dwarfed by the civic poison of fraud and “easy” money.
I don’t understand what energy’s fungibility has to do with anything I’ve said. Most economic uses of energy involve exchanging it for productive capacity or consumer demand. Bitcoin definitely is an economic use of energy, just not a good or desirable one.
I don’t think the directly comparable elements of the financial system (i.e., storage and settlement) use anywhere near as much power as Bitcoin does. Unless you’re doing that thing where you’re comparing the entire traditional economy to Bitcoin, which is silly: the traditional economy has actually valuable outflows, and Bitcoin does not replace factories and their workers.
Not a good or desirable one in your opinion. It is absolutely good and desirable in my opinion to have neutral money that can be used by anybody but controlled by nobody. The US dollar is secured by military force which has a staggering energy footprint. Bitcoin finally settled roughly the same amount as Fedwire last year and uses exactly as much energy as it needs to.
Working on what? Smart-contracts? Privacy? The only thing Bitcoin has going is LN, but even than, it will not succeed - simply because a better alternatives exist.
Privacy on the base layer means the supply isn't auditable. Lightning network has sender privacy and improvements are being made to receiver privacy. I did smart contracts stuff on Rootstock yesterday. I don't need my base layer doing that thanks. I just need it to be money.
They aren't censoring anyone. People can pay to host their own infrastructure. Crypto projects are a legal liability for service providers and frequent abusers of service offerings. I honestly wish they would have been less specific in there reasons to not make it seem like some ethical dilemma but point is there are good reasons to not allow these types of projects. I don't trust them less I just know not to host certain projects there and follow a general etiquette. If I wanted to use them to host something more controversial then I'd reach out first to see if they'd allow it and build that relationship. This is no different than wanting to display a controversial banner in a private establishment. They end up taking on some liabilities which I'm sure they would like to be informed before doing so in order to make sure they will help provide some support if it becomes a challenge.
A lot of the comments so far have been negative, so I’ll add a positive one: I think this was the right move, and I’m content (as an actual paying member) with it.
Kudos particularly for the well-laid-out position statement. Drew and I have extensive differences in opinion when it comes to software, but his sincerity and willingness to put his money where his mouth is are apparent in cases like this.
I don’t believe Drew or any of the other Sourcehut admins profess to be the moral guardians of humanity.
The “first they came for X” argumentative tack is built around the common understanding that you should stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, because nobody will be left to stand up for you should you need it. Are you claiming that the cryptocurrency industry can’t stand up for itself? I thought that was the whole point of this autonomous, uncensorable, etc. stuff.
That's not how the argument and poem[1] goes. If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?"
A lot of people building crypto tools also are happy to use centralized services like GitHub, SourceHut, GitLab, because they might not be satisfied with the alternatives.
I'm very familiar with the poem, thanks. Take a look at the last line!
> If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?"
Actually, I suspect that's precisely how some people would defend it. And why wouldn't they? It's completely independent from agreement or disagreement with the position.
"... but what if your business was the one being purged because the owners profess to be the moral guardians of humanity?"
I'm sympathetic to your objection but I note with interest that their announcement included this paragraph:
"We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal ..."
... which is a catch-all that covers edge cases that I might be worried about.
It's not scalable, but sr.ht isn't that big so it works for me.
I would accept that another person has chosen not to do business with me and take my money to a vendor who would choose to do business with me. Or host my own source control. Anyone is free to choose not to take my money because they disagree with the business I choose to conduct.
Well, you login, no big warning signs, you become a paying customer, years later the owner decides that you are not welcome. Why was it Ok before? Don't know. Same could happen to anyone anywhere and that is not ok. And a violation of basic human decency, I guess. Not that I think this one would connect.
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
First of all, they keep the gate open for appealing the decision, and they are not applying a blanket, shoot first, ask questions later ban on the matter.
On the other hand, I'm supporting the decision made by Drew and the company, as a paying SourceHut member.
Do you know literally anyone who is running a business that is reliant on sr.ht and cannot be moved? sourcehut is small, and they go out of their way to help you migrate data away from their service. If this kills you, move to github and digitalocean like a normal person.
There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree. Some things are harmful to the lives of those around us, and just as the private individual can cast a social/cultural vote against this harmful thing by refusing to engage with it and support it, a business can cast a vote in the same way against the thing its maintainers see as harmful. Inaction is also political, and I think acting according to your values is better than pretending to be a bystander.
Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view.
Let's also not forget that, even if you disagree with sr.ht's stance, you can still freely benefit from the thousands of hours of work put into SourceHut by self-hosting it for whatever project you want. Therefore, I think the maintainers' work should be applauded regardless of your take on this post.
[^1]: This is, of course, assuming the view that cryptocurrency nearly universally causes societal harm; some people may disagree with this, but this is a separate question.
I'd like to hear more about your view, but I don't quite see how what you said applies. My point is that, _if_ you considered cryptocurrencies to be nothing other than a scam, it makes sense to ban them on account of the harm they cause to others. Your examples of Signal and Telegram are not the same thing at all, as they are general communication platforms also used for many things other than terrorism. If there was such a chat app specifically made for and exclusively used for terrorism, then yes, I think banning it is the way to go on the grounds I mentioned above. Can you elaborate more on the details you think we disagree on?
> Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view.
Yeah, just like Tor, which is also heavily associated and almost exclusively used for illicit and illegal activities; especially by fraudsters, criminals, scammers, tax / sanctions evasion and illegal drug dealers.
If Tornado Cash is not welcome on SourceHut due to the same association of illicit activity, then I should see no exception to the Tor Project hence it's extremely negative enablement of illegal activity going on there should it attempt to get its source code hosted on SourceHut.
The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.
Arguments and use cases for anonymity are very easy to come up with.
Blockchain related projects cause damage on two fronts:
- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.
- The tech around blockchains (almost) qualifies as snakeoil. The use cases are nonexistent in the way they are portrayed. This perpetuates some pseudoscience equivalent in the realm of technology. Which is dangerous on its own. Blockchain is like Homeopathy.
No other use case has come up, and any blockchain related project has to simply lie from the get go to even justify its existence. (NFTs; "block chain in gaming" which is total bs from start to finish, portrayed as if they magically make assets appear in other games, which makes no sense whatsoever; block chains where they offer 0 advantages over databases, because a single company keeps ownership and administrative privilege; et cetera)
"Lots of stuff is bad and so all of it must be bad" is a weak argument. Look at email: 85% of mail is spam and scam.
If you read beyond the hype the use cases are very clear, even if they are very narrow: disintermediation, decentralization, and making permissionless payments and contracts.
Blockchains like Monero and zcash are pretty good ways to handle anonymous payments across the world, compared to sending cash in an envelope or trusting a third-party with your privacy. If Tor would be allowed on SourceHut even with its negatives, so should Monero and zcash. Monero and zcash were not built with the explicit goal to scam people, and they do provide features that were not easily achievable prior to this technology.
> The difference is that projects like Tor were certainly not created with any devious purpose in mind.
Oh it was. It was created specifically to enable US agents communication with the headquarters. Which is definitely a military/intelligence purpose. And giving general public a tool for anonymity was specifically an exercise in providing a anonymity set for agents.
>- They are commonly created with the explicit goal to scam most people while making very few people rich.
Examples? I'm struggling to come up with examples outside of something like "ponzicoin". The typical token/ICO project has some plausible business model (ie. you're investing in a token that allows you to use this smart contract, which presumably will have demand if the smart contract becomes popular) which makes it hard to call it an "explicit" scam, even if it does turn out to be effectively a ponzi.
Basically most ICOs. Almost anything that mentions tokenomics. Most of these only function when you have an influx of new buyers. This basically includes all that provide a token to use some smart contract. In the worst case, you have a useless token that you can use with a smart contract that does precisely nothing. Apart from having made some people money and providing money for the affiliated companies, even if they have a business model, it would in most cases be better served to function without blockchain. As someone else said, the most compelling use case is independence from banks and other institutions, which is an ideological position that does not serve most business models.
> There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree.
I also disagree, so long as competitors that disagree with such decisions are also permitted, and so long as the entity in question is not monopolistic or is acting as some kind of widely used utilities for speech. On some issues dissent isn't permitted, and there are many cases where some platforms are arguably acting as utilities.
I agree with you! There's an interesting discussion to be had there in the general case. SourceHut being easily self-hostable means this isn't an issue in this case.
I disagree with this. Inaction is merely an acknowledgement that we can't be informed, effective activists on everything. I'm pretty much disengaged from political activism these days, because I don't want to be manipulated into joining the human equivalent of a botnet. Instead I focus on the one area (accessibility for disabled people) where I'm actually knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion, and where I can actually do something meaningful.
Edit to add: Also, accepting the status quo on some things, even if one doesn't think it's ideal, may be necessary to be maximally effective in one's primary area. So my main open-source project in the area of accessibility is maximally permissively licensed (the MIT/Apache dual license typical in the Rust community), is hosted on GitHub, and targets proprietary platforms first, because I care more about accessibility than any of these other things.
I have no problem with this specific decision though.
It seems to me like the disagreement isn't as big as you make it out to be. This is an instance where the maintainer of a business has strong views that they consider well-informed on the social impact of an issue, and there is no pragmatic barrier to taking action according to their values, so they are doing this. Inaction in this case might be reprimandable, but I am not saying that I reprimand them or you for neglecting other social issues or anything like that. I am sympathetic with the idea that we cannot all have well-informed views on everything, and that we might not want to act based on half-baked views. I think there is a subtle and interesting discussion to be had there.
Fair enough. I think Drew is right to value issues such as environmental impact and global wealth inequality to the extent that his company turns away some software projects, even free software projects. I mainly replied to his comment because, taken out of context, that kind of argument can be used (and IMO sometimes is used) to pressure people into taking a stand on a particular issue of the moment.
There are billions of political issues on Earth. Do you think if someone isn't protesting against water spoilage in some random village on the opposite side of the planst, then they support it?
To clarify, I would narrow my statement, perhaps, to something like this: "inaction [regarding a subject with which you are familiar and are in a position to act on] is a political position".
Any technology that we built is used for both good and evil. For example, assembly was used to get people on the moon, but also to navigate missiles to kill millions of people. Perl was used to sequence the genome, but also it was the main language that script kiddies used in the 2000s to deface millions of websites. Almost any library written is dual use, from openssl to left-pad. The web itself is used to enable world wide education and giving everybody access to all the knowledge in the world, and is also responsible for the fall of democracy. Torrents and peer to peer tech is also with interesting ratio.
Of course the good:evil ratio is different for any technology, but this also changes with time.
It feels weird to me to draw the line at crypto. A good example for the debate would be 'why dont you remove the torrrent projects as well, given that torrents are almost exclusively used for "illegal" activities'
PS: I really hate cryptocurrencies :) but just got interested in: why do you draw the line there?
It's subjective. For us, it's a question of social impact. Sure, torrenting copyrighted material is illegal, but what's the actual social consequence of it? Little to none. Bittorrent also has a wealth of legitimate use-cases. For cryptocurrency, this is not the case: the social impact is grave, and there are few to no legitimate use-cases for it.
It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem to agree with your statement that there are few legitimate use-cases.
No, Venezuelians were forced into cryptocurrency by a completely incompetent leader that thought that making your country based solely around gas was a sensible idea, and despite buying millions upon millions in various cryptocurrencies, has lost over 50% of their investment.
The bolivar is still hyperinflated, the Petro is still useless.
To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive.
Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test.
That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.
I think you're conflating financial value and social value (CSAM may have some financial value, but highly negative social value). I really struggle to see how you could (even theoretically) traffic CSAM for "good reasons".
In many minds Europe is the epitomy of state overreach, the home of pro-consumer anti-business regulation. The truth is of course more nuanced, but this appears to be a move consistent with an owner who believes in consumer protection regulation.
Cryptocurrency developers are free to exercise the same rights and move their projects to somewhere else. But I agree it's very stupid. I paid for a year of sourcehut for my account that I never used just to help the project. I'll just delete it at this point.
If you view compliance as overreach then I find it odd you think the EU has less of it. Strong consumer laws such as GRPC are in the EU and not in the US. Even in terms of corporate finance there's a reason everyone like Delaware corporations and it's not due to them wanting more compliance. The US has other things that could be seen as overreach but compliance is usually not one that people think of.
To make just one example, millions of people make use of cryptocurrencies for remittances to send money back home. By using cryptocurrencies they can circumvent the obnoxious fees and delays they would get if they use traditional payment services.
Worth noting too that SourceHut is offering an escape hatch for exceptions so it’s not quite a blanket ban:
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
A more interesting question would be "Where does the line move to in the future?".
Its unpredictable because its clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group.
> clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group.
At the same time there are many other git repo hosting sites that are not run and written pretty much almost entirely by a single person or small group...
As a paying customer, I am disenchanted. I agree with Drew's views on cryptocurrency on a personal level, but banning someone for using a technology before even knowing whether or not it's primarily being used to break the law is not what I had in mind.
Sure, ban harassment, spam, illegal activities, and abuse of platform. But this kind of banning seems more arbitrary even than GitHub's, which is sort of what I was getting away from when I went to SourceHut.
> "We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support."
Sounds very reasonable to me.
After all, there is a real problem which needed solving, i imagine it also eats up a lot of wasted time/cost.
Thanks for sharing RocketGit. This is the first time I've heard of it, and yes, it does look like a cool copyleft solution to self-hosted Git.
Another interesting option is Brendan Caroll's got[0], which allows sharing of repositories over INET256[1]. I'm sure there are other P2P approaches to Git, but this one recently piqued my interest. Unfortunately, it has a confusing and unresolved naming[2] conflict with OpenBSD's got (Game of Trees)[3].
I don't work on cryptocurrency projects but this arbitrary decision doesn't instill confidence in sourcehut. Very little upside, huge potential downside. Strange business decision. Aren't your users there because they prefer "freedom"?
People use SourceHut for a wide variety of reasons. One of them is confidence in our strong moral compass and our willingness to make the right choices even if it could impact our profit, as contrasted with typical VC-funded operations in the market. I've never really heard anyone talk about SourceHut offering particularly more or less "freedom" than anyone else.
With all due respect, I do not care about your moral compass.
I want the predictability that as long as I am not breaking the law, my data can be safely hosted. Am I supposed to now pay attention to law and the countless individual moral compasses of people/vendors I interact with?
Moral compasses are tricky, some people let them run amok, and end up infecting computers with revenge-ransomware just for having their system language set to Russian, as it happened in March 2022. Was that also justified for the "greater good" of humanity?
Of course, it's your project, your service... anybody can fork it or self-host it, but this only screams at me: "be wary of this guy and his services, you could be next".
PS: I do not maintain cryptocurrency projects or trade any.
All companies operate according to the moral compass (or lack thereof) of their founders. Some of them simply choose not to state their morals.
I don't think that the slippery slope argument which is being made here and throughout the thread holds much water. We've made no indications that we're planning to address any other use-cases in this manner and we've made the reasoning behind our decisions pretty clear; it's my hope that you can infer our future behavior from these details. If you want any clarifications on SourceHut's position on any other topics, I would be happy to share my thoughts.
I was not implying that you'll slip into such extreme policies, it's just that people with strong moral compasses are often unable to reevaluate their positions: "this is good, so it cannot be wrong".
Which leaves me no choice but to trust all my future projects to services run by people as you put it, "without a moral compass".
If I'm into (say) 3D printing and create software for it, I simply will not risk getting de-platformed just because some dude is upset people are 3D printing guns and guns are bad. The day 3D printing is illegal/restricted, I'll stop or accommodate to regulations.
I chose "3D printing" as something innocuous, but feel free to replace it with anything divisive and controversial... People just do not realize who *exhausting* it is dealing with founders with strong moral compasses. (And yes, I get it's their/your prerogative and if I don't like it I can GTFO. Just venting off.)
I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for all you have done.
But you are so opinionated, unrealistic, and unreasonable. Are you seriously suggesting that arbitrary censorship is ”making the right choice“?
You brush aside valid criticism to push your own ideology. A little restraint and pragmatism would go a long way. You are the modern RMS, both in a good and bad way.
I understand your frustration, but this is not arbitrary: we've outlined a specific niche and clearly stated our reasons for banning it, and set aside a means for projects to appeal.
I am an opinionated person, and perhaps you find some of my opinions unrealistic or unreasonable. However, SourceHut is handled separately from my personal opinions and governed by clear and well-defined values which are much narrower than my personal beliefs.
Opinionated, but objectively not unrealistic, unreasonable or arbitrary.
There has been a clear statement made about the reasons for these actions and they are obviously realistic, reasonable and specific. You just don’t agree with them.
I am not only talking about this incident, but in general. There are many other examples, including Drew insulting people for having valid reasons not to use Wayland yet. Stuff like that.
This makes me legitimately willing to move to SourceHut and even pay them for it. Oh no, cryptobros can no longer clone a repo, run sed "s/RenameMeCoin/SuperDuperMassiveReturnsShitCoin/g' and run their scam on SH, what a shame.
Quite disappointing. I really don’t understand the dogmatism people have for crypto these days. I don’t think most people are making their own conclusions. As soon as mass media found a credible way to bash crypto, it seems that the discourse has completely and artificially reversed. Being dogmatic means missing out on cool projects and hampering progress. I think the right questions to ask are: “how can we improve this tech to use less energy?”, “how do we stop nefarious and harmful use?”… The ‘common take’ now is to just bash crypto rather than to improve it. It’s obviously a cool piece of technology and it’s a real shame to see it just be outright slandered now.
Today its cryptocurrency and most people probably aren't affected (and thus dont care but they should). Tomorrow it is whatever the people in charge dont like with no way to know what they might not like in the future. It could be anything, File sharing, gaming, something political, something religious, something containing unwanted words, a project maintained by Russians... who knows.
A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects.
Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation.
The fact is that sourcehut is not a corporate megalith. I don’t believe these concerns apply.
> A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform
Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
Sourcehut is licensed under AGPL. It's free and open source software, you don't need permission. Even if the licensing were changed (something I view as extremely unlikely, since it would affect non-crypto customers as well), you can legally take an older snapshot of the code that is licensed under AGPL.
Legitimate use-cases are not banned, per the article:
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
I mean, those are clearly cryptocurrency-related projects which fall well within the scope of this policy. The exceptions are not to let the "good" cryptocurrency projects in -- there are no such projects -- but to make sure that projects which are close to this domain get a fair shake, like something which incidentally uses a blockchain-like data structure, GNU Taler, etc.
Thanks for being responsive here.
I would really appreciate it if you could satisfy my curiosity.
So, following on the logic presented - any project that slightly touches on decentralized finance is problematic?
How about languages? Would smart contract languages like Solidity, Vyper, Huff and Move be disallowed under this policy?
Would repositories touching on ECDSA suddenly be impacted? Will research repos into ZKP use in blockchain?
How can security researchers add exploitation examples that use one of the aforementioned languages?
I assume you didn't intend to prevent knowledge sharing that can actually educate developers and prevent attackers from affecting the same unsuspecting users this move supposedly helps.
Like most things, this is a complex topic which spans large intertwined ecosystems. They don't all boil down to get rich quick schemes - that's the part I find most misguided.
Keeping with the sentiment you present, a less destructive and easier to digest policy for consumers ( without arbitrarily dismissing all blockchain-adjacent development teams ) would be something like making sure tokens ( ERC20, for example ) and other forms of digital assets require some kind of approval process with your scrutiny.
Blanket banning the Ethereum codebase due to fear of potential fraud / misuse is the equivalent of demolishing the building a stock exchange is in when proper recourse would be de-listing or freezing stocks that are suspected of being fraudulent.
"These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality"
This can easily be applied to other markets.
Does that mean that a repository that helps fetch current OTC stock prices be disallowed as well? If it doesn't, why would that be different from an API for crypto conversion rates?
I feel like this could have been handled better - wouldn't it be a bit easier if you define a much narrower scope than "prohibition of cryptocurrency or blockchain-related projects"?
There are a lot of projects that depend on the use of validated ( or fiat reserve based ) cryptocurrencies and are not widely considered to be scams as your opinion suggests. Just take a look at Aave, Superfluid and certain DAO projects.
There are governance mechanisms in place - they may not be everyone's cup of tea, but neither are moves done by non-blockchain companies in the public sphere.
Preventing access to technologies for decentralized accumulation / pooling of wealth ( DAOs, for example ) just aligns SourceHut with centralized regulatory measures and extreme censorship, causing more issues to those already harmed by censorship and abuse of power from their own governments.
Terrible decision in my opinion but I'm actually glad that people expose their true feelings like this. It doesn't affect me because I don't host with sourcehut but this just makes it clear who they are and what they stand for.
You can easily expect more of these types of bans now, because why not?
Do you really think that he wouldn't also ban anti-vaccination information sites? Blogs that host antivaxx content? A crawler that caches anti vaccination content so it doesn't get lost?
That's just the most obvious recent example where a critical mass of society has designated something as 'the truth' and everyone who doesn't accept it is bad. I believe this is how he got to his decision about the cryptocurrency ban.
What about code that measures climate information and it happens to measure that global warming is no problem and proudly broadcasts that?
Anti-immigration companies? GOP campaign sites? The list goes on and on.
Very good question. I'm very certain that this is where they would all be banned and it would become a very political case rather than a business decision, even if all of them accounted for 80% of Sourcehut's revenue; especially when your examples are not illegal in the US; this could be different when they move to another country.
As a keen Sourcehut subscriber that's disappointing. I don't care much for cryptocurrency, but prefer my service providers to be far less selective than this.
Sourcehut is open first, so all is not lost: those excluded could host their own.
On balance, I'm looking at alternatives, but might stay.
> We are in the process of moving SourceHut to the European Union, and have incorporated in the Netherlands. Consequently, the terms have been updated to clarify that users are required to comply with Dutch law in addition to US law. The requirement to comply with US law will be removed in a future update after we close the US entity.
Interesting, I typically only hear about moves in the other direction. What's the motivation if I may ask?
The boring business answer is that Europe has better laws regarding user privacy and many of our users have asked us to store their data in jurisdictions which are more respectful of that. But, also, after I moved to Europe for personal reasons, we don't have any permanent staff left in the United States and little connection to the US in general.
We just set up a new datacenter installation in Europe and we're working on setting everything up. I can't offer a timeline on when things will move, but it is planned.
I was recently considering moving to Sourcehut or Github after self hosting using gitrc for over a year. I have been going back and forth over self hosting versus leveraging an existing service, but this news and fumblings over Gitea last week have pretty much put me right back into self hosting..
Because Github is a company I have no control over, like Sourcehut, Gitlab and others? The fundamental problem is, "Do I hand over control to entity X?" and I am leaning more heavily towards no than I was previously.
One of the reasons I moved from GitHub to SourceHut is the user-hostile political activism GitHub was throwing in my face. Like including the command to quietly rename any branch you're on to "main" in the instructions for uploading an existing repo.
I'm still not sure how I feel about this change. One can see it as activism, but at the same time it's still done with respect to users and I tend to trust the maintainers here to be reasonable.
Hm, I do not see any definition of "blockchain technologies" in the new ToS. Will that be added? My understanding of "blockchain" is that for example git could be described as a application of blockchain technology.
First question: Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition?
Second question: If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not?
> Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition?
It's intentionally subjective. A tounge-in-cheek analysis could conclude that git is a blockchain, but no one suggests this seriously. The terms establish a worldview and framework around the problems cryptocurrency and blockchain projects impose on society, and it's within this framework that projects will be evaluated -- not simply on the basis that the word "blockchain" appears in their README.
> If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not?
That would likely be permitted on the basis of a subjective analysis of the situation. Linux is a project which is mostly used for use-cases other than cryptocurrency. After all, many blockchain tools already run on a Linux userspace, but that's no cause for dropping Linux.
The rules are not written in stone: they are guidelines that we enforce hand-in-hand with the cooperation of the community and within a space where all participants are encouraged to discuss the situation and argue for their views.
While I'm still not happy about this change (well, I do not like more entries on the list now that I've actually read it), I'm happy to hear there will be a actual human in the loop you can talk to before having the repository deleted. At least that is my tl;dr understanding of the second part of your answer.
> for example git could be described as a application of blockchain technology
Git isn't a blockchain as it lacks a consensus mechanism. It can however be used as an append only immutable distributed ledger. If that's all you need, you don't need a blockchain.
That's precisely why consortium and private blockchains do not make any sense. Either they have a consensus mechanism that's useless and wasteful, or they're just not blockchains.
We can't call everything a blockchain otherwise it's not possible to talk about the technology in a meaningful manner. Blockchains were invented in 2008 in the Bitcoin paper. Merkle trees dates back from the 80s. It makes no sense to call a Merkle tree that happen to have the constraint of having a single child per node a "blockchain" except to ride the hype train.
Merkle trees have a lot of legitimate use cases. Blockchains only and single use case that make sense is making so-called "cryptocurrencies", which in turn has a single use case which is speculation, which is not something either useful to society or desirable for most people.
I expected a bit better of someone who faced a lot of anti-Wayland dogma, which I noted as being very similar to anti-cryptocurrency dogma, most of which I am seeing repeated for the umpteenth time in this post and thread.
Am I affected? sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman ... I would appreciate knowing so I have time to move and since you (drew) are in this thread this is the expedient way to find out...
I'm not sure what this project is for, but on the face of it it does not seem to be a problem. If it develops further and starts to run afoul of these rules, we can discuss it further and if necessary work together to ensure a smooth transition to another hosting provider. If you'd like to clarify more about this specific project, feel free to email me (sir@cmpwn.com) (or just elaborate here on HN).
It is meant to solve the class of problems (in the computer science sense) that is cryptocurrency. This is because I want a name system where the definitions are given meaning relative to our economic system but where the economics within the network should converge on better incentives (which is why the approach should encompass the space of solutions; so we can find the points in that space which have good tradeoffs w.r.t. reality, our current central currency model systematically produces pollution and the motivation of datalisp is to eventually replace that system with a provably better one).
You can assume for the time being that this project is permitted on SourceHut. Once it materializes further and its relationship to the social problems of cryptocurrency becomes more clear, we can evaluate it properly. It seems that you at least have a pretty good background on the problems with cryptocurrency, so I'm optimistic about this project. Good luck!
Degrading? Hah! man.. I've prioritized this problem over everything else in my life to the point where it has almost killed me and it has robbed me of everything.. when you are living on the street with 0 money in your pocket and you need to take a shit and the bathroom costs a coin to enter then what do you do? Cause I guess the difference between us and dogs is that you can poo straight into the plastic bag, no need for the intermediate step... Now if I would accept a job creating problems for regular people I'd have north of 100k for sitting in my chair and occasionally pressing a few buttons on my keyboard. But my refusal is absolute, the problem I am working on is important and if no one is willing to pay me for it then that is not my problem (yes it is but it is even more everyones elses problem than it is mine).
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
It seems a lot of folks are missing that you can appeal if you can demonstrate your project isn’t (subjective and objectively) causing social problems.
I'm a paying member and a bit on the fence about the call, but I do feel a bit reassured that the topic isn't wholly banned. As the maintainer noted, inaction on topics is also political. Projects have been banned and not banned on other forges too, and I haven't seen them concisely laying out what is and isn’t ban-worthy. For instance: look at what happened with GitHub and the youtube-dl ban when capitalists in the media industry wanted it gone for piracy, but inaction allowing ICE repositories as folk cried out for a ban for being associated with human rights violations.
This doesn't prevent a team from self-hosting SourceHut or another forge either—or sending patches upstream. You can't say that about the most populated forges.
To be fair, I'd say many people _use_ cryptocurrencies to execute Ponzi schemes. The original motivation behind it (anonymous, fast and censor-resistant money) is something I like, just the execution and everything that followed (monstrous energy usage, speculation, scam, Ponzi) is what I dislike.
Who is running the Bitcoin ponzi? The CEO of Bitcoin? Any other type of computing/calculation you'd like to make illegal? Maybe everything that gets hashed with SHA-256 should be preapproved by the government first?
This moral high horsing on all things cryptocurrencies is getting really old. Thank God Bitcoin can't be stopped no matter how high the horse. We'll keep on voluntarily opting in to our own monetary system thank you very much, nobody is forcing anybody else to do the same. Keep making those horses as high as you like Bitcoin isn't going away.
I knew a company from the UK who sold dropshiping websites, then rug-pull ready tokens (+ website), both hosted on sourcehut (with the "critical code" sold with the support). They sold everything six month ago? Solid devs, but the moral wasn't quite there. At least they made really big bucks while it lasted.
okgood riddance. and as a consumer, i applaud your decision to make it easy to migrate your customers' data to other hosting provider. it shows that you won't take your customers' goods as hostage which makes the public opinion -- especially hn crowd -- of you much better.
maybe next year i will become a customer of you. i still don't have the energy to apply credit cards.
0.01 ETH or less, through decentralized staking pools.
But your main argument is wrong: validators do not control the network. Users running node software do. Running a node is free. If a single validator began to exert unwanted control, the honest majority of non-rich users could slash or evict them.
It’s not the majority of stake that controls the chain, it’s the majority of honest users. Rich validators can collude to have 51% staking power and start to exert unwanted force, like censoring blocks for their own profit or doing something else unwanted, but the majority of honest users can decide to coordinate a soft fork and point their clients at a new chain. The controlling validators will only be rich on the old chain.
“Richest get richer” could describe any form of capital investment in a risk-on asset that appreciates over time: buying gold, stocks, real estate, art, VC. If you have capital to place at risk in an investment that gives you a return*, you are “rich and getting richer.”
Unlike stocks and other investments, you don’t need a large amount of capital to receive a PoS reward, and there are less significant economy of scale. All validators receive an equal % return no matter how much Eth they deposit. Those without 32ETH capital can use pools and decentralized staking platforms to receive the same % return minus a small fee to the service who has the capital at risk and is doing the work to validate.
Opposite to a pyramid scheme: if more people join Eth deposit pool, everybody including early investors earns collectively less % reward on their stake, and the equation for this is explicit and known! And the staking deposit of each new entrant does not funnel back up to early entrants.
* Note: a lot of these investors are down since last year, not just Eth but stocks and other investments have crashed.
Well, their comment doesn't necessarily indicate if any of their projects would be affected, but rather that this change generally undermines their trust in SourceHut. I'm sorry to hear that this is the case.
Even if any of their projects (or the projects of anybody who's reading these comments) are affected, this is a sign of things to come - kicking projects out for political reasons and moving to the EU means that one never knows what may come next.
In a sense, you're correct: this is a political position. But hell, so is everything else, including doing nothing, which is a political position in support of the status quo. We have always prohibited malware and bigoted comments, for example, which is a political stance in the same sense. However, I think that we have justified the stance on cryptocurrency pretty well with objectivity rather than opinion, which to my sensibilities is the key distinction between "political" and "non-political" opinions to the layman, in so far as such a distinction can even exist.
But kicking out projects and kicking out people is not the same thing. We will not ban anyone who expresses support for cryptocurrency -- they can host any of their projects which are not cryptocurrency related and participate in the rest of the platform as always.
I would instead say that doing nothing is a political position in support of individual autonomy: users working on cryptocurrency projects if they think that's best, or working against cryptocurrency projects if they think that's best.
It sound like a business decision more than anything, although they do give some ethical rational my guess is that these projects are a legal liability and abusing the platform.
> The scope of this is intended to cover incidents where users harass other users or make bigoted, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc, comments on our platform.
You say "harass other users OR make bigoted...etc, comments on our platform."
The fact that you said "or" means that you intend to kick users off who make comments that you judge to be that, even if it's not harassment. Doing so is admitting that you will ban people purely for political differences on those topics.
"Certain [gender|sexual|racial|etc] identities are not valid" is a political opinion held by those to whom I am quite comfortable telling, as the official policy of SourceHut, to go fuck themselves.
Just to be clear though: are you kicking them off, or telling them to go fuck themselves? Because your comment above indicates that you wouldn't kick people off for simply having different political opinions.
You most certainly are kicking people out for political choices. You gobbled up all the FUD and posted it on your ToS:
> These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment.
I honestly mean no offence but you are most definitely making choices for your users from a place that demonstrates lack of understanding.
Fiat currencies are the #1 tool criminals and corporations have used for ages to ruin the world and I don't see SourceHut banning projects using those (that would be ridiculous) but instead choose to ban a set of technologies that a minute percentage of the population uses like that's going to make any meaningful change.
Drew, fiat currencies are debased at the rate the old man chooses making everyone poorer and less well off every single day through inflation and that is what you choose to perpetuate.
The people will continue to innovate with or without Source Hut.
> These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found...
While presumably you're not kicking people out because they disagree with you on this political question, your motivation for kicking them out is deeply political. You're practicing a "boycott, divestment, and sanctions" approach to cryptocurrency projects, based on a flawed analysis of how those projects affect the structure of the global economic system — an analysis also reflected in your lack of understanding of how dramatically "piracy," largely funded through Bitcoin, has reduced barriers to access to knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33404025.
If you want to understand how cryptocurrencies affect people suffering from economic hardship and global wealth inequality, read my post from last year on the topic, based on direct personal experience, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744.
The distinction you're drawing between being in favor of cryptocurrency and publishing code that implements cryptocurrency seems to suggest that you don't believe code is speech, because its distribution should be limited in ways that other kinds of speech are not. In turn, people who believe code is speech should be wary of using your service.
More generally, I don't think people who are setting up a software project to do good for the world should have to worry about the level of geopolitical savvy of their project hosting service. If the project hosting service misunderstands some aspect of development economics — maybe they're in favor of import-substitution industrialization or organic farming, and the project is instead supporting export-focused industrialization or industrial fertilizer production — its users shouldn't get their namespace revoked and perhaps then taken over by their political opposition. Not even if they're wrong.
It's a political fact that rich people in Holland only hear about Indonesian Nike factory conditions when they are terrible; they are consequently not in a good position to judge the balance of harms and benefits. Certainly the factory workers are being "taken advantage of" in a way which is possible because they are "suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality" — but in fact export-focused industrialization has lifted billions of people out of poverty in the last three decades despite the harms it has caused, harms measured in lost eyes and hands rather than just money. (The case against organic farming is much less clear — but still something that should be resolved by the people involved, not overseas infrastructure providers acting on a incomplete understanding founded in political agitprop.)
"fazfq" accused SourceHut of "kicking projects out for political reasons". Drew rebutted, "We do not kick people out for political differences." (Emphasis mine.) I was pointing out that these can both be true, the former is clearly true, the latter does not imply the negation of the former, and the former can still be bad even though it doesn't imply the latter.
Kicking projects out for political reasons can still be bad even if Drew is right that crypto is bad. BDS can still be bad even if settlements in the West Bank are also bad. Al-Qaeda can still be bad even if US foreign policy is also bad.
> These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community.
I'm going to send this to everyone who I know is involved in crypto/blockchain.