Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Maxime Devos]

Martin Becze schreef op zo 20-02-2022 om 12:13 [+0100]:
> I don't consider mining to be wastefully and this is a extremely
> subjective opinion.

What is subjective about the numbers about energy consumption?
Quoting myself:

‘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].’

[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

(*) the word ‘absurd’ might count as subjective here

Where exactly you draw the line between wasteful and not wasteful
is rather subjective, but the numbers theirselves seem rather objective
to me and wherever the line lies exactly, these numbers seem to be
well over it.

It should be a users choose whether or not they want to mine. A
corner stone of free software is "(0) The freedom to run the
> program as you wish, for whatever purpose." By limiting what is 
> accessible to the user based an arbitrary, authoritarian and
> controversial morality goes against the nature of free software.

Guix refuses to have anything to do with non-free software, banning
it from its repositories.  That seems a bit authoritarian to me.  Some
people would say that's rather arbitrary of Guix.  There's still plenty
of software that is being kept non-free, so I guess that ‘software should
be free’ counts as ‘controversial morality’?

Along the same lines, Guix disabling telemetry and removing Google
Analytics from documentation could count as patronising to upstream.

I suppose that technically, ‘don't mess up the planet’ is ‘controversial
morality’ given the existence of various lobbies etc., but I don't
think we should listen to them; we all live on this planet after all
(unless you're a space alien of course :p) and it's not like we have
any back-ups.

Additionally, from a technical point of view, nothing in Guix is stopping
people from messing up the planet.  If they feel like it, they can
make a package definition and run "guix install -f
produce-lots-of-carbon.scm" or the like, or publish a channel, etc.

While it's the user's choice whether they _want_ to mine or not
(Guix is not a thought police!), it seems inadvisable to _help_ people
with mining and perhaps useful to _stop_ people from mining.
That is, stop people from doing the act, not stopping people from
wanting to mine.  Actually stopping people would be something for the law
and state though, not Guix.

Caveat: there's a risk of descending a slippery slope here, see e.g.
the mail by Taylan Kammer.

Greetings,
Maxime.

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