Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Maxime Devos]

Taylan Kammer schreef op zo 20-02-2022 om 13:20 [+0100]:
> If we're going to exclude software on grounds of it being used in harmful
> ways, I can already see people arguing that one should exclude software
> such as aircrack-ng for aiding in breaching into networks, or anonymity
> software like Tor because it aids perverts in sharing you-know-what or
> aids terrorists in planning attacks.  Slippery slopes and all.
> 
> One might argue that those pieces of software also have good uses, but
> the same could be argued about a crypto miner: perhaps I want to install
> one simply to study its operation to aide in some sort of research, maybe
> even research about its inherent inefficiency.  Or maybe I want to devise
> a small-scale blockchain-based network for a niche use-case where the
> blockchain won't reach an unwieldy size or will be limited in lifetime.
> 
> All in all, I think the baseline is that if something is software, and it
> respects the user's freedoms, it belongs in Guix.
> 
> What do you think?  I'm happy to have my mind changed.  I've never used a
> crypto miner and continue to be disinterested in them so don't care about
> this particular case all that much, but the principle behind the reasoning
> bothers me somewhat.

The points about slippery slopes, research and niche use-cases seem
reasonable to me.  I do see follow-up questions though, should the
description in Guix warn about potential issues?  And should the
description focus on research uses? ...

More concretely, the p2pool description is:

‘Monero P2Pool is a peer-to-peer Monero mining pool.  P2Pool
combines the advantages of pool and solo mining; you still fully
control your Monero node and what it mines, but *you get frequent
payouts like on a regular pool.*’

This is quite a bit different from, say, aircrack-ng which seems
to be mostly about assessing security, whereas the p2pool description
is about gaining money (see ‘payouts’), and without mentioning that
mining costs a lot of energy (and hence money, and possibly the money
that is gained by mining is smaller than the amount lost due to energy
costs!).

My dislike for the description of p2pool might just be my views on
money leaking through, though.

Greetings,
Maxime.

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