Because the efforts of Anna's Archive are unfortunately currently very much illegal, and XMR is one of the few cryptocurrencies that can actually offer some privacy to its users.

I've used XMR before. Just surprised seeing it to pay for legitimate & harmless visualization work.

I see, that makes sense

So what you’re saying is you think XMR is just for buying drugs, and you’re also saying you’ve used XMR before.

Hmmmmmm

/s

Because it is a book download site, which is illegal in every country that has copyright, and revealing one's identity with a bank transfer would be a stupid way to go to jail.

They use monero because what they are doing (copyright infringement) will get you in to big trouble anywhere in the western world. Without cryptocurrencies much of the modern large scale archival efforts wouldn't be possible, or at the very least would significantly increase risks for the people participating in it. For me this alone is a good enough reason to admit that there are valid reasons for existence of privacy coins.

The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.

Major efforts at creating "everything" libraries are usually looked upon as a positive effort that benefits all of humanity, and we generally mourn the loss of any such effort, regardless of whether the effort is against the laws of the state at the time the effort was undertaken, or even if the collection was created in a morally reprehensible way.

See: Library of Alexandria, Library of Congress, GenBank, the Svalbard seed vault, Google Books, Internet Archive and all its efforts, ...the Louvre, and most major museums.

In general, we collectively recognize - without having to be told - that preservation of knowledge is a noble and worthy effort that transcends the fleeting whims of a population at a point in time.

All that to say, people probably don't need to be tricked into liking such efforts. They're popular because of what they are.

No one is objecting to knowledge preservation - when you just preserve it instead of abundantly replicating it with a wink.

Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.

Even more reasonable people are objecting to weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.

> Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.

how?

> Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.

Do you honestly believe that our current copyright framework is mainly aligned at maximizing incentives for knowledge creation?

This sounds absurd to me. From my point of view, the copyright framework has been shaped (by continous lobbying efforts) into a system to maximize extraction of profits from existing IPs.

That is very different from incentivizing "knowledge creation", because the lions share of income is spent on overhead or distributed to shareholders, with the "knowledge creator" (i.e. author), getting <20% of each sale. Furthermore, the mechanisms to balance income are ALSO abysmal (to maximize knowledge creation incentives, it would be necessary to "overspend" significantly on "young" writers, enabling them to feed themselves at the start of their careers).

> weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.

How is Annas archive weaponizing copyright violation? How is it furthering Putins interests?

what a bunch of nonsense

>Why are they using crypto, and, weirdly enough, specifically the crypto people use for buying drugs, to award this?

You really have to ask why a illegal/grey site is using currency that is build to protect privacy and anonymity?

is this some kind of sarcasm?