Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Maxime Devos]

[CC'ing some people in Guix I know to be interested in cryptocurrency]

Hi,

Guix packages some cryptocurrency(*) software (bitcoin, monero, some
people have been working on packaging ethereum).  So far, it only
appeared that clients are being packaged.

More recently, a ‘miner’ for monero has been packaged
(https://issues.guix.gnu.org/54068).  At least for bitcoin, mining is
known to consume an absurd amount of energy (the footprint of a whole
country, and 1 Bitcoin transaction is said to be equivalent to 735121
Visa transactions)[1].

Guix has a policy against including malware[citation needed 2], and
furthering global warming[3] (and energy prices[4], if [3] is not bad
enough for you) seems rather bad behaviour to me.

Would these miners be considered malware in Guix?

TBC I'm not making a case for rejecting all inefficient software, only
software that is absurdly inefficient by design -- a, say, math library
not using vectorised operations might be quite a bit less inefficient
than a math library using vectorised operations, but that can be
resolved with some programming work and it would seem to pale in
contrast to the mining situation.

Greetings,
Maxime.

(*) For this e-mail, I'm only considering cryptocurrencies based on
some ‘mining’ system and assuming that monero and ethereum have the
same energy problems as Bitcoin, although possibly with a smaller
constant factor.

[1]: See, e.g.,
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/2021/03/09/business/dealbook/bitcoin-climate-change.html
/
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/2021/03/09/business/dealbook/bitcoin-climate-change.html

[2]: zero hits when searching for "malware" in the manual!

[3]: I'm sure you can find some sources about destabilising climate
systems, species extinctions, fish getting third-degree burns, island
nations gradually disappearing because of raising sea levels ...

[3]: I'm not sure actually that mining would be (partially) responsible
for increasing energy prices but it seems plausible to me.

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