Is it good or bad for scientific research projects to make money by hyping memes and then donate them?
Written by Alex Liu, Foresight News
DeSci + Meme is still popular, what are the good angles? Do these meme coins really contribute to science? Some people can’t stand it anymore and shout (hype desci all day long) “Have you ever donated a penny to sci-hub?”
What is Sci-hub?
According to Wikipedia, Sci-Hub is a shadow library. It uses different methods to bypass publishers' paywalls. In 2011, Kazakh graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan decided to found Sci-Hub because the cost of research papers behind paywalls was too high. Its users are all over the world. In February 2021, Sci-Hub's homepage showed that it stored more than 85 million papers.
Sci-Hub and Elbakyan have been sued for copyright infringement twice in the United States. Both times, the defendants failed in absentia. Sci-Hub has been praised by the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for effectively disseminating scientific knowledge and providing government-funded research results to the public for free. Publishers have criticized it for copyright infringement, reducing their own revenue, and endangering the network security of universities (but publishers may just be exaggerating the threat. Sci-Hub has also induced publishers to set stricter paywalls.)
In her defense of Sci-Hub, Elbakyan would in turn question whether the publishers' business practices were ethical and in accordance with Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She insisted that running Sci-Hub was a moral imperative and that the law should not stop her. She once said, "If all Americans followed the bad laws, they would still be ruled by queens today and slavery would still exist."
Meme coin scihub
"Have you ever donated a penny to sci-hub?" 0xAA, former chairman of the Peking University Blockchain Association, thought this question made sense, so he donated 0.1 ETH.
But if it just stopped at donations, there would be no exciting story afterwards - 0xAA bought 22% of the supply of scihub's meme coin of the same name.
This meme coin called scihub has reached a market cap of $70 million overnight. And 0xAA's 22% of tokens are worth tens of millions of dollars. Will he donate 20% of the tokens as promised? Does donating 20% of the supply justify this crazy hype?
At the beginning, Sci-hub's founder Elbakyan did not agree with the project.
But later she added the option to accept SOL wallet donations on Sci-hub’s webpage.
Afterwards, 0xAA stated that it had reached a consensus with Elbakyan and would keep its promise to donate 20% of the tokens.
dispute
The incident caused great controversy in the Chinese community, mainly divided into two points:
Insider trading allegations
Some people have accused 0xAA of insider trading. 22% is only the number of tokens held in its public wallet, and the number of tokens actually controlled is much higher than this proportion.
Why not just donate?
Is it to help scientific research or a money game? Some people think that donations should be made directly instead of hyping memes.
0xAA also said frankly, "I want to make money, the kind that everyone can make together." He hopes that everyone can win together, profit from meme coins, and support the operation of Sci-hub.
Supporters' views
Opponents have their own opinions, and there are also many people in the community who support 0xAA's behavior, comparing the behavior of raising funds through memes and then donating part of the chips to the lottery model.
