I've seen estimates of the total sci-hub/libgen size at anywhere from 20TB to 75+TB. Probably there are lots of dupes in there, and a dedicated dedup effort could reduce that size by a bit.
But taking the upper end: A WD Black 10 TB platter drive[0] costs $329, which means it would take only $2700 or so to have enough storage space to archive what's basically the sum total of human scientific knowledge.
> what's basically the sum total of human scientific knowledge
That’s an exaggeration. First, a lot of scientific reference books are not a Sci-Hub. Second, decades of published materials have not been digitized and are not available there. Third, very recent work (2020-2021) are often missing as well. And finally, there is a biais towards English and articles in other languages (for instance Korean, Chinese) are often not present despite being indexed or available on other networks.
Sci-hub is awesome and I use it almost daily but it’s not perfect yet and it’s not near "total sum of scientific knowledge" yet either.
You can pick up an 8TB WD black external for $200, and I saw cheaper WD EasyStore 8TB’s at retail in Best Buy today at $180, and that’s just what I saw offhand earlier today.
I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes.
I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
> I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes.
In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
The problem is that it could be a self repairing system though right?
Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc.
You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
> I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent.
You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs.
In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.
Is it possible to create a «proof of pain» cryptocurrency, where holders repratedly stab themselves with sharp objects to increase their cryptocurrency balance?
Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion.
Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D
Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form.
If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value?
That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me.
On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot.
Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
> Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion.
Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block.
That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with.
Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain.
>Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
> Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain
Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
Your understanding is basically correct. The "market cap" of a cryptocurrency is a meaningless marketing number - there's very little actual dollars in the cryptocurrency system.
When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.
Stocks confer ownership of a company. If Apple remained the same, but everyone went insane and started selling Apple Stocks for $0.0000000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, I would buy every one and then collect the dividends.
Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
Except many stocks do not, in fact, pay dividends. Amazon doesn't and it's one of the most highly valued companies in the world. Meanwhile, just as a lot of crypto does not pay dividends I could make use of DeFi platforms to get it on the crypto I do own, or simply get Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies, then you can see the staking process as paying dividends of a kind.
I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
Hopefully everyone can see that there is a difference between being a 75% shareholder of Amazon, and being a 75% shareholder of dogecoin, in terms of the real assets that allows you to bring to bear. Regardless of which one is paying dividends.
Proof of stake crypto doesn’t pay a dividend. Stock splits where you hold more shares but total number of shares double are effectively a null transaction. It’s only the underlying value that matters not the number of tokens.
All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.
Amazon had net income of $21 billion on 2020. Were you the sole shareholder you would be entitled to collect that if you chose. Currently amazon reinvests to grow but that doesn’t mean profits aren’t there.
Meanwhile if you owned all of bitcoin and wanted to keep the current hash rate you’d have to pay in about $20 billion a year, maybe more.
From a cashflow perspective, one is certainly better than the other to own, even if you are barred from selling.
We need to be extremely careful using this kind of argument (or, in fact, fallacy). By the same token, we all get some secondary exposure to some toxic substances, we might as well not care at all and expose ourselves more. When you think about it, exactly the opposite makes sense.
So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.
I’ll add, the 14TB WD externals disappeared off the shelves at the local Best Buy in the past month. The data hoarding subreddit was calling those the best price per TB. There were some $140 listings for an 8TB drive on Amazon a week or two ago, but now they’re $165 and out of stock. I think crypto and hoarding are the reasons; of course inflation is a multiplier.
Good question. It's about $0.023 per GB per month for a US East Coast instance, so some $1700/mo for 75TB. Plus you don't really control the data if it's on someone else's computer so there's a potential opportunity cost there as well.
On the other hand the data would be much more reliable in that scenario. A 10 GB consumer hard drive is likely to fail or at least corrupt some data at some point, and if you’re going to go with multiple redundancies then your cost goes up.
But yeah, it’s all kind of moot. I had AWS suspend my account once because someone complained they found a copyrighted image on one of my servers. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t really control it.
You can buy "datacenter-grade" drives from WD on their website, which are presumably of higher quality.
Either way, though, this is going to cost five figures, annually, to store in S3. For half of one year of S3 you can have a fairly robust RAID setup, maybe replace 1 drive every two years, and enjoy the data any time you want it without fees-as-a-service.
> I had AWS suspend my account once because someone complained they found a copyrighted image on one of my servers. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t really control it.
Considering the material here, that's more likely to happen than not. So, unlikely to be "much more reliable" for this particular scenario. ;)
I should have clarified in my original comment, the torrents that say scimag down at the bottom of the page are at risk torrents containing papers from SciHub.
Actually it is. It's implying what's the value (relative) of hosting only fiction (science fiction I assume) as opposed to actual scientific knowledge.
I use it to download books I bought but can't be downloaded anymore because Barnes and Noble bought the publisher/online-retailer and forbid downloads from non-US citizens (yep, that is a thing).
DRM related too. I bought books on Kindle but recently trying to highlight and process my reading notes more. Turns out publishers can set an upper limit to highlights (e.g. 20% of the book) and just cut the highlights off randomly. Infuriating, and I end up re-downloading those books (and more) off of libgen so I know my highlights are reliable.
An ebook reader plus the fiction section on LibGen (and its predecessor ebook-sharing websites) has allowed me to avoid spending money on novels for nearly a decade now.
Yes, often the novels I was reading were part of the modern canon (e.g. works by Nobel laureates) and ought to be freely available to all – I think everyone has a right to a basic cultural education, and copyright shouldn’t be enforced on things considered canonical. But other times, the novels I was reading were pretty inane genre fiction with little claim to cultural value, so yes, it was piracy for the sake of entertainment. Instead of trying to deny that LibGen is used for that, I think we might celebrate it.
IME when you move away from Math/Engineering libgen tends to have a much thinner selection (although I'll admit that I've always gone to standardebooks for fiction.)
Recently Mega took down a popular ethereum miner download for no given reason. Underground archival is much more difficult than people give credit for. Most vpn's being U.S. based are well within logging laws + secret court orders. TOR just this week had hundreds of exit nodes flooded in for an attempted deanonymization attack. It's tough times for being a data share.
It's actually fun to entertain the possibility. How would you exploit this? It could be just replaced cryptographic constants in key papers... But it could also be some random psychological "discoveries" for the people to quote. A couple of "10-hour shifts considered very good" here and there, and the society will be completely brought to waste by the middle-managers unable to stop quoting them.
While I think it’s incorrect to assume PDFs cannot be exploited, I’m using computer viruses as a metaphor. What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?
> What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?
That grad student is visited by representatives from the military-industrial complex and is quickly drafted to doing that again. Imagine creating nerve agents by accident, what a breakthrough!
I thought sci-hub and library genesis were independent projects?
At any rate, I applaud those who are willing to stick their neck out somewhat to stand up for all of us students, scientists and engineers who need access to the material on Library Genesis.
I don't think so, but this didn't become less important, and both sci-hub and libgen could use a donation or help with archiving/seeding those TBs of scientific articles
But taking the upper end: A WD Black 10 TB platter drive[0] costs $329, which means it would take only $2700 or so to have enough storage space to archive what's basically the sum total of human scientific knowledge.
[0] - https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-...
That’s an exaggeration. First, a lot of scientific reference books are not a Sci-Hub. Second, decades of published materials have not been digitized and are not available there. Third, very recent work (2020-2021) are often missing as well. And finally, there is a biais towards English and articles in other languages (for instance Korean, Chinese) are often not present despite being indexed or available on other networks.
Sci-hub is awesome and I use it almost daily but it’s not perfect yet and it’s not near "total sum of scientific knowledge" yet either.
Hard drive prices are supposed to decrease in $ per TB over a multi year period, with advances in areal density.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843
I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc.
You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent.
You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs.
In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.
Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market
Proof of impact prediction?
But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.
Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D
Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form.
If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value?
That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me.
On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot.
Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block.
That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with.
Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain.
>Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to discover they were always broke.
As people sell, value plummets
That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme
Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.
Meanwhile if you owned all of bitcoin and wanted to keep the current hash rate you’d have to pay in about $20 billion a year, maybe more.
From a cashflow perspective, one is certainly better than the other to own, even if you are barred from selling.
So basically if someone invented an eco-coin, that is a well-designed project fostering technologies focusing on healing the Earth (more efficient waste recycling, green energy, better air filters, new technologies for toxic and nuclear waste removal etc.), taking into account all the consequences of extreme popularity (none of the existing coins have, or they simply don't care), I'd be the first to invest in it, knowing that even if I lose, I win.
But yeah, it’s all kind of moot. I had AWS suspend my account once because someone complained they found a copyrighted image on one of my servers. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t really control it.
Either way, though, this is going to cost five figures, annually, to store in S3. For half of one year of S3 you can have a fairly robust RAID setup, maybe replace 1 drive every two years, and enjoy the data any time you want it without fees-as-a-service.
High five for avoiding AWS!
Considering the material here, that's more likely to happen than not. So, unlikely to be "much more reliable" for this particular scenario. ;)
You'd need to consider method costs, egress, etc on top of all that, to be fair
Downloading 20TB would take me 74.074 hours @ 600 mbps.
Downloading 75TB would take 277,7 hours.
Both sound reasonable. Am I missing something?
I have special place in my heart for these people as they are persevering knowledge and making sure everyone gets access to it
As they say knowledge is power
For more information you can visit u/shrine’s original post here —> https://old.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/e129yi/charitabl...
I_Byte's post suggested that we would be "helping out", presumably with the topic at hand, which fictional works are not.
Anyone else use it to download books onto your kindle??
I get the connection, but Libgen is an entirely different thing than torrenting copyrighted media for entertainment.
Yes, often the novels I was reading were part of the modern canon (e.g. works by Nobel laureates) and ought to be freely available to all – I think everyone has a right to a basic cultural education, and copyright shouldn’t be enforced on things considered canonical. But other times, the novels I was reading were pretty inane genre fiction with little claim to cultural value, so yes, it was piracy for the sake of entertainment. Instead of trying to deny that LibGen is used for that, I think we might celebrate it.
That grad student is visited by representatives from the military-industrial complex and is quickly drafted to doing that again. Imagine creating nerve agents by accident, what a breakthrough!
I thought sci-hub and library genesis were independent projects?
At any rate, I applaud those who are willing to stick their neck out somewhat to stand up for all of us students, scientists and engineers who need access to the material on Library Genesis.
LibGen is also great.
sci-hub bitcoin address (from sci-hub.do): 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
libgen donation page https://libgen.life/viewtopic.php?p=79795#p79795