SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
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> 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.
So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn't true.
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...
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]
[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2022-crypto-crime-repor...
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.
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.
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.
The solution doesn’t lie in the cryptocurrencies or similar systems.
This only results in more cat and mouse games, nothing else.
Ah, we also waste a lot of energy, I bet this is not important in the midst of climate change and energy crisis we’re having.
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.
Good luck with that.
> 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.
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 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).
> Terrorists cause far more physical harm than all of crypto will ever do. Do we ban Signal and Telegram repos so that we can "protect the people"?
This is a stupid summary with glaring false statements. It should be rightly ridiculed and rejected.
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.
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".
[1]:https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-game...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The benefits have been relatively modest so far.
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.
That financial system uses many more magnitudes of energy.
This is like blaming dollars for the existence of bank robbers.
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.
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.
This idea/delusion that energy that is used for mining should and could have been used for something else. It's just not the case.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. People mine Bitcoin on the grid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your work on accessibility! :)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Drew has the absolute right to ban crypto from his platform, but it is a piss take to try and justify it as being a societal harm.
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?
The bolivar is still hyperinflated, the Petro is still useless.
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".
It also has a positive impact.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
Oh, well. RocketGit[1] looks promising.
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.
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].
[0] https://github.com/gotvc/got
[1] https://github.com/inet256/inet256
I’ve been enjoying Codeberg as a GitHub/GitLab alternative.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 liked sourcehut, but now I'll have to recommend against using it.
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.
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.
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.
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-...
Can you make a coherent case for why a legitimate and licit application of crypto should not be allowed on your source hosting platform?
To give an example of a legitimate and licit application: Endaoment.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, I typically only hear about moves in the other direction. What's the motivation if I may ask?
I'm more likely to run a self-hosted instance for myself, but this would be good to know from my employer's PoV.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Isn't for example for Linux technically Linus acting as the "consensus mechanism"? Or does it have to be automated?
What use does crypto have?
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.
Thank you Drew.
Cryptocurrencies are ponzi schemes, they are scams, they should be illegal
There are better ways to fight the current system than with other scams
there is nothing illegal there, you play with the words, you know excatly what i'm talking about
"whitepaper: by investing in GreenCoin you help save lifes in africa by helping us plant trees"
coinbase, binance and every other exchanges facilitates these ponzi schemes
since institutions are playing blind, how do you fix the issue?
it's similar with Twitter and conspiracy theorists, are you against free speech? shouldn't we ban them and delete their tweets?
it's the same here, you don't give them a place to prosper
bonus:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012462
oh i remember that account :'D
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.
Does this mean that all private repos on SourceHut will be made public, from the 1-1-2023?
maybe next year i will become a customer of you. i still don't have the energy to apply credit cards.
Got it.
sir@cmpwn.com
Sorry to see you go.
> 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.)
So what if it's political? You think crypto is good, Drew thinks it's bad.
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.
Kicking out projects over that position is kicking people out over a political difference.
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.
There is no room for them and I respect your position.
> 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.
What else does this mean:
> 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.
It does. What are you going for next? Gambling software? Piracy software? Redsec tools?
Understandable to ban crypto specific software that enable scamming (and general scamming software). But to generalize an entire ecosystem?