SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurrency/

by ddevault • 4 years ago

206 250 4 years ago

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?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

tifadg1• 4 years ago

I find it ironic that you're moving from the US to reduce impact of state overreach (compliance), yet want to overimpose on your users.

tmtvl• 4 years ago

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.

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

I appreciate you taking a stance like this.

noxer3• 4 years ago

The social impact is grave

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.

noxer3• 4 years ago

Why do you draw the line there?

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.

ev1• 4 years ago

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...

divbzero• 4 years ago

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.

djbebs• 4 years ago

Source hut is an unreliable partner and we should move everything off of there as soon as possible.

Got it.

ddevault30• 4 years ago

Feel free to reach out to support if you need help getting your data exported:

sir@cmpwn.com

Sorry to see you go.

fazfq2• 4 years ago

Sorry to see him go? From what I read you are kicking him out.

frankjr• 4 years ago

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?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

minimaul• 4 years ago

Out of interest, is the physical hosting located in Europe or planned to move there?

I'm more likely to run a self-hosted instance for myself, but this would be good to know from my employer's PoV.

Herbstluft4• 4 years ago

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".

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-game...

_aavaa_4• 4 years ago

Seems conspicuous of valve given tf2 hats and cs:go skins.

Herbstluft4• 4 years ago

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.

threatofrain• 4 years ago

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.

newbieuser• 4 years ago

what exactly is this site alternative to?

razetime2• 4 years ago

a site doesn't have to justify its existence by being an alternative to anything.

toastal2• 4 years ago

No, but it gives contexts to those unfamilar. Comparisons and genres are how we categorize and understand the world.

gtirloni• 4 years ago

Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc.

throwaway22032• 4 years ago

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.

timeon• 4 years ago

Bitcoin with proof of waste is not just about flavour.

exo7628• 4 years ago

And yet Drew hasn't made an exemption for Ethereum, which does not do proof of work.

haarts• 4 years ago

But it is. Your negatively charged comment just proved that.

encryptluks22• 4 years ago

It says they are willing to make exceptions if you contact them with compelling reason.

arghwhat6• 4 years ago

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.

orwin• 4 years ago

To be honest, this is a bit too late i think.

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.

nibbleshifter2• 4 years ago

That's unfortunately a terrible position to take, and a shitty precedent for the platform, but whatever, it's their prerogative.

I liked sourcehut, but now I'll have to recommend against using it.

razetime2• 4 years ago

It's a pretty ordinary position to take right now, I believe.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

The people to have respect for were those who prohibited cryptocurrency during the boomtimes, not those who pile on against it during the busts.

abstractbeliefs• 4 years ago

D. DeVault running the forge, not the mint

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

if you do crypto i'm sure you can find a way to host your own sourcehut instance

Barrin92• 4 years ago

In my opinion a good and ethical stance to take, together with the move to Europe and focus on privacy makes me glad to pay a few bucks per month.

colesantiago2• 4 years ago

This is very welcomed, cryptocurrencies have been always a net negative on the environment, society and for everyone.

Thank you Drew.

zeroclip10• 4 years ago

How is proof of stake a net negative on the environment?

tossl56822• 4 years ago

Proof of stake is a perpetual motion machine.

cinntaile• 4 years ago

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"?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

trevyn• 4 years ago

A single highly opinionated founder is great until it turns out that your opinions differ even slightly.

I’ve been enjoying Codeberg as a GitHub/GitLab alternative.

Hendrikto2• 4 years ago

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.

AlexAltea2• 4 years ago

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.

ohgodplsno2• 4 years ago

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.

Nathanba• 4 years ago

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.

rvz2• 4 years ago

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.

alberth• 4 years ago

How much of this is due to not wanting build/pipeline servers getting abused for mining purposes?

https://builds.sr.ht/

ddevault30• 4 years ago

None: the mining incidents stopped entirely when we started charging for CI and it stopped being profitable to do it.

toastal2• 4 years ago

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.

exo7628• 4 years ago

Drew, will you reimburse people who do not wish to use your hosting after this change?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

Sure. You can reach out to support to request a refund for the remainder of your unused paid service.

zeroclip10• 4 years ago

Seems like virtue signalling from an over-controlling project maintainer with a grudge against blockchains.

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.

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

bitwize• 4 years ago

And what are the odds of getting an automatic "computer says no" response?

seibelj• 4 years ago

So brave!

zeroclip10• 4 years ago

Seems extremely arbitrary. Would ENS get a pass? What about Ethereum itself?

openfuture3• 4 years ago

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...

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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).

openfuture3• 4 years ago

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).

exo7628• 4 years ago

Why you consider even negotiating such thing? Don't you find it degrading?

openfuture3• 4 years ago

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).

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

Lot of throwaway accounts at the top of this thread, that's quite funny fun, and telling about this site

Cryptocurrencies are ponzi schemes, they are scams, they should be illegal

There are better ways to fight the current system than with other scams

tossl56822• 4 years ago

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?

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

bitcoin is a CIA/FED project to crowdfund the development and harden the security of the tech, to prepare for the digital EURODOLLAR

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

TobTobXX• 4 years ago

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.

freedinosaur• 4 years ago

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.

woodruffw13• 4 years ago

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.

nurettin4• 4 years ago

You can cheer for your ideology, but what if your business was the one being purged because the owners profess to be the moral guardians of humanity?

woodruffw13• 4 years ago

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.

bastawhiz• 4 years ago

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.

rsync• 4 years ago

"... 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.

marshal_mellow• 4 years ago

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.

orange-mentor3• 4 years ago

Run your own git server you noob

ElfinTrousers2• 4 years ago

Then I'd quit whining on Hacker News and go find some other hosting. Rugged individualisms!!!!111!1!!!!!1!!!!!!!!11!!!!!!!1111!!

bayindirh3• 4 years ago

The announcement is more nuanced and detailed:

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.

vladharbuz4• 4 years ago

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.

peyton• 4 years ago

It’s a political statement. I don’t think declaring “inaction is political” makes it so. Sounds like sloganeering.

ddevault30• 4 years ago

Inaction is a political position in support of the status quo. It is the equivalent of saying "I am fine with this".

rvz2• 4 years ago

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.

Herbstluft4• 4 years ago

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)

naasking• 4 years ago

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.

vladharbuz4• 4 years ago

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.

kamikazechaser3• 4 years ago

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"?

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.

vladharbuz4• 4 years ago

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?

_wolfie_3• 4 years ago

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?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

_wolfie_3• 4 years ago

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.

p4bl02• 4 years ago

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.

_wolfie_3• 4 years ago

Git isn't a blockchain as it lacks a consensus mechanism.

Isn't for example for Linux technically Linus acting as the "consensus mechanism"? Or does it have to be automated?

tossl56822• 4 years ago

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.

helen___keller2• 4 years ago

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.

dist1ll• 4 years ago

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.

MartijnBraam• 4 years ago

At that point it would be nonfree, a huge step to take

helen___keller2• 4 years ago

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.

ddevault30• 4 years ago

We are not in a position to change the license terms of SourceHut:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-...

anxiously2• 4 years ago

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..

lostmsu• 4 years ago

How does this affect GitHub?

anxiously2• 4 years ago

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.

kamikazechaser3• 4 years ago

What happened over at Gitea? New drama? I'm ootl

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

A takeover was announced a week ago (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421). This got a negative response by the community (https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471) but the owners disregarded them (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280). The reason behind the response being that Gitea was a community-led project with an electionary process. A fork is eminent.

noxer3• 4 years ago

Just another company to avoid at all cost.

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.

envolt• 4 years ago

Never read a better summary before -

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.

tossl56822• 4 years ago

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.

minraws• 4 years ago

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...

garren• 4 years ago

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.

[0] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

hrbf2• 4 years ago

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.

Bilal_io2• 4 years ago

> and sanctions evasion.

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.

ddevault30• 4 years ago

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.

bayindirh3• 4 years ago

Technological solutions to social problems are the root of all evil.

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.

srhtftw• 4 years ago

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.

tossl56822• 4 years ago

Bitcoin

gnull3• 4 years ago

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.

fl0id4• 4 years ago

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.

hda2• 4 years ago

And I'm going to reply with this (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417786):

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.

Rantenki• 4 years ago

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.

djha-skin• 4 years ago

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.

Oh, well. RocketGit[1] looks promising.

1: https://rocketgit.com/

DavideNL• 4 years ago

"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.

1MachineElf• 4 years ago

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].

[0] https://github.com/gotvc/got

[1] https://github.com/inet256/inet256

[2] https://github.com/gotvc/got/issues/20

[3] https://gameoftrees.org/

orange-mentor3• 4 years ago

I applaud SourceHut for this decision.

joeman1000• 4 years ago

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.

_zllx• 4 years ago

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.

imran-iq• 4 years ago

Wayland is usable? I am using it currently as my display server and have been for many years

What use does crypto have?

LanternLight83• 4 years ago

Just as a Dad-joke, this is kinda ironic; bc "git is a blockchain" :p

gnull3• 4 years ago

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.

Cameri2• 4 years ago

Are projects using Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or Amazon Managed Blockchain banned too?

lygten• 4 years ago

..and grants us permission to do things like display your content on the website.. <

Does this mean that all private repos on SourceHut will be made public, from the 1-1-2023?

ddevault30• 4 years ago

No, that's not what this means.

lemper• 4 years ago

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.

SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

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