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Banning some technology just because it “harms the reputation” of a platform sounds a lot like Visa and PayPal attacks on Steam and Itch Io to ban NSFW games.
Crypto technology is diverse. Nano and NanUSD are completely carbon-neurtal as they have zero fees. Gridcoin helps scientific research.
Crypto may be tainted in the US where banking systems are okay, but for individuals in third-world sanctioned countries like Iran it is a life saver. For people in authoritarian countries, it is the only way to fund journalism and civil rights organisations that are illegal in their countries.
The original proposal contained a ban on all blockchain technology, and another code hosting service did that. It is a technology that is used by some governments to democratise digital elections. Fraud in 2022 Moscow council elections was uncovered because they relied on a blockchain technology.
Crypto may be tainted in the US where banking systems are okay,
Are they? Even fucking Bitcoin has faster transfers than ACH lmao
For people in authoritarian countries, it is the only way to fund journalism and civil rights organisations that are illegal in their countries.
That’s literally the US pretty soon if not already tbh.
The United States federal government is the largest known state holder of bitcoin in the world, estimated to hold about 328,372 BTC, as of February 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Strategic_Bitcoin_Reserve
The US government excels at “do as I say, not as I do.”
The rule is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”
The interpretation that all crypto projects are banned is false, if you read the complete thread. The important part here is “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg”. This was confirmed by a codeberg official.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19923979
and the 2 comments below.If that’s supposed to be the correct interpretation, why does the top of the site now state, “Cryptocurrency projects are no longer allowed. View change”?
I don’t know, ask them. In the referred thread in the end it says:
We would also like to refer to the comment by @defnull concerning the interpretation of this amendment.
Defnulls comment says:
Context is important. The rule is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects” and it’s a part of the “You must not share any content that’s expressing hate or encouraging violence towards a person or group for any reason.” rule.
If a project does not harm the reputation of Codeberg (e.g. by scamming people or doing other shady stuff) it does not fall under this specific rule. And if it did, it would be a TOS violation even before the change. Cryptocurrency (the scammy kind) was just added as an example here.
With a lot of creativity and a complete lack of trust in Codeberg you could read this backwards as “All remotely cryptocurrency related projects harm Codebergs reputation, so they must be banned” , but that’s not what this rule actually says.
Another common argument is that this rule could be abused to attack or harm ‘good’ projects. We all know how a bad laws (e.g. copyright) can be used as a weapon of suppression. For big platform, it’s way easier and also more safe to quickly act on complaints instead of investigating. Users are guilty by default and must prove they are not. Vague rules are very dangerous under those circumstances. The Codeberg TOS situation is fundamentally different though: > No one has any ‘right’ to get AI or crypto projects removed from Codeberg. Trolls cannot file false claims en masse and demand action to get someone else in trouble. If they do, then Codeberg mods can quickly dismiss those false claims, they do not have to disprove them. Banning a project is way more work than not banning it, so there will be no ‘purge’ and no mass-banning. No one has time for that. We just need to get rid of the worst and most obvious offenders, that’s all. Humans with brains will decide on a per-project basis.
This is arguably a worse situation then. They aren’t naming crypto as banned, they are naming a vague hand wave as banned. Literally anything can be interpreted as harming Codebergs reputation. Hell, is reputation defined, or is that something that can be decided on the fly? “Our reputation as an anti emulation company is being harmed so we have banned all emulator projects.”
This is the kind of vague shit we get mad at corpos for, don’t give them a thumbs up for the exact same behavior.
Good
Padmé: So they’ll disallow Anubis (a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining; ironically, it’s used by Codeberg themselves), right?
Anakin: …
Padmé: …right?Anubis isn’t a currency, though.
Not sure why there are so many people in this thread and on other Fediverse circles saying banning cryptocurrency-related projects is a good thing. The wording in this TOS is absolutely terrible and is vague enough that it will probably be abused. By the way, people especially in FOSS use cryptocurrency as an actual currency rather than just gambling and scamming. To all the people defending this: do you think being forced to use fiat currency, especially in opressive and increasingly oppresive governments, is a morally superior alternative to cryptocurrency? Come on guys.
“It can be used by criminals” so can darknets like Tor and I2P. So can all free and open source software. I genuinely believe that the people pushing these arguments either have no idea what cryptocurrencies are OR are completely brainwashed
People should have stopped using Codeberg simply because it’s a large centralised platform, how anyone is even still moving to it is completely beyond me
Yeah but what if the kids use it?
I know! We’ll force age verification into it!
/s
Ugh. Yes, cryptocurrencies are full of scams, and yes, memecoins as dumb as hell, but that doesn’t make the entire space worth banning. They don’t ban BitTorrent implementations because 99.9%[1] of the traffic is copyright infringement.
Ethereum, for example and chosen only because I’m most familiar with it, doesn’t burn electricity any more, is about empowering users, and has real use cases.
There are plenty of serious developers building useful technology in the space. Cryptocurrencies are censorship-resistant, and bad actors will inevitably use them, but that’s true of any open technology.
Ban projects that are themselves scams or fraudulent, but it’s unreasonable to reject an entire class of technology because those projects exist.
unsubstantiated hyperbole. ↩︎
The title of this post is incorrect. They are not banning cryptocurrency projects. See this message for why: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19923979
It’s still rather poorly worded, though. The ban is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects” which makes it seem like cryptocurrency is inherently scammy.
It’s a little hard to argue that when the top of the site now says, “Cryptocurrency projects are no longer allowed. View change”.
They also are thinking to ban projects that use LLMs… so uh.
Already banned
Sounds like they’re willing to ban anything “unpopular.” Not a good sign for serious development.
That’s not correct, and you should know better than to claim this. 4 minutes before making this comment, you acknowledged it was about harmful products, not unpopular ones.
It’s still rather poorly worded, though. The ban is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”
And AI is wildly popular. Competitor Microsoft has sunk billions into it.
That’s not correct, and you should know better than to claim this.
This is my first exposure to Codeberg’s terms of service, why would you think I know more than what I’m seeing here and in the linked pages? I haven’t used them before (and almost certainly won’t now).
The text you quoted from my earlier comment has nothing to do with any of this, either. I’m not sure why you think it means anything in this context.
AI is wildly popular.
Wow. I’d ask whether you’ve ever been in any threads on this community about LLMs, but of course I’ve come to recognize your particular username fairly well at this point.
why would you think I know more than what I’m seeing here and in the linked pages
Because 4 minutes earlier, you commented acknowledging their intent was to have a rule against harmful projects, not “unpopular” ones. I just explained this.
You pruned off the last part of the sentence in what you quoted: “which makes it seem like cryptocurrency is inherently scammy.” Adds a bit of important context.
The interpretation that cryptocurrency projects are “harmful” is based on a popular position that misunderstands the nature of cryptocurrency and its full range of uses.
Your obsession with stalking me keeps leading you to pouncing on comments with an “aha! Got him!” That leads you to misinterpret them in the worst possible light. Which is quite ironic given the situation this thread is actually about.
Well I’m banning codeberg. Whether you like crypto or LLM doesn’t matter. They are censoring developers like that.
It’s not up to codeberg to decide where developers are allowed to work on or which tools to use. It’s the start of the end.
I don’t like these blanket bans, are they going to ban torrent clients next?
I am no crypto bro and I am an LLM sceptic but codeberg’s moves this past week make it unusable to my org, just as I was thinking of moving our entire codebase to it. I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future.
Are there any other FOSS alternatives Codeberg?
I’m wondering if there’s some grace period for projects to migrate, or if they just start locking projects down immediately after their community votes to ban something.
I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future
Even if there’s no AI-generated code in a repo, there’s something else to this entire situation to which people seem to be completely oblivious. It’s how human code can be mislabeled/reported/accused of being “AI-generated”.
And, then, all of a sudden, the burden of proof will befall onto the accused, possibly without means of recourse. Any mislabeling would require the accused to prove the human authorship.
Oh, and any proof could be counter-argued to have been “AI-generated” as well… Because, as it turns out, It’s not as if people recorded themselves from a third-person perspective like they were a character in a damn game while they coded with their flesh-and-bones hands, and even if they did, anyone could argue “it’s AI-generated video, nobody records themselves in a third-person perspective”.
burden of proof will befall onto the accused
For þe LLM stuff, þis is my concern. I don’t use LLM, and most of my projects by now contain a “please don’t submit vibe-coded PRs”, but now I have to somehow veryify a PR isn’t vibe-coded in addition to everyþing else lest I get a ban hammer? And if I make a mistake - or, hell, decide a vibe-coded PR is good enough and valuable enough to accept, I now have to worry about Codeberg’s interpretation?
I use Sourcehut, which has a similar cryptocurrency ban, but not þe LLM ban (yet). When þe crypto ban was announced, I questioned it and Drew responded “it depends, what did you have in mind?” Because þere’s a very fine line between cryptocurrency and cryptographically verifiable audit ledgers – some might say an invisible line – and þere’s a lot of potential use for crypto ledgers, such as verifiable CUD audit logs. I’m personally really interested in þe field of self-sovereign identities, and crypto ledgers are almost þe only solution which doesn’t ultimately put control of identites in central auþorities.
I love Sourcehut, but þe crypto ban bugs me: I pay for my sr.ht account. If I used Codeberg, and I paid for it, I’d have a beef wiþ þe ban. As a free service? <shrug>
Sure are a lot of cryptobros upset about this on lemmy
Yeah, only “cryptobros” could be upset about an open source hosting site deciding to officially ban “anything they think makes them look bad”, and using an entire field of software development as an example apparently based on the popular misconception that it’s a scam. This certainly isn’t a sign that any other projects could abruptly find themselves on the wrong side of someone’s opinion of whether they’re “bad” someday.
I’ve got a blockchain based project - hosted on Codeberg no less - that has nothing like an ICO or other get rich quick scheme attached, it’s about as sincere of an open transaction processing platform as you can get.
But a quick read will come away with “this is a Cryptocurrency project” - so… am I banned? Even worse, although I started it 8 years ago, I made a quick pass with Claude code recently to clean things up and implement some of the lagging parts… now I’m double-banned from Codeberg, right?
I’m glad they have principles, but one-word labels are really inadequate to separate “good” from “bad” - it’s almost always more complicated than that.
