Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com>]

On Sunday, February 20, 2022 7:44:18 AM EST Taylan Kammer wrote:
> On 20.02.2022 13:37, Maxime Devos wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I guess a different description would be better.  It sounds almost
> like a sales pitch with the mention of making money. :-)
> 
> I'm not familiar with Monero/P2Pool so I don't know what a better
> description might sound like though.

This description sound like it is promising that, if you run this software, 
you will "get frequent payouts". I don't think that's a claim Guix can or 
should make. I guess there's maybe some tension about to what extent package 
descriptions are speaking on behalf of the package or on behalf of Guix, but I 
don't think it usually causes too much confusion for the description of a 
package like `pypy3` to say what the program's developers think its merits 
are, without Guix as a project appearing to take a position on which is the 
best Python implementation. However, a package description claiming that you 
will get money if you use it seems like quite an extreme case.

(More generally, I share both the concerns about the impacts of crypto mining 
and the concern that for Guix to refuse to package such software might have 
problematic implications.)

-Philip