Re: Excessively energy-consuming software considered malware?

[Martin Becze <martin@becze.org>]

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> What is subjective about the numbers about energy consumption?

The numbers are not subjective. As stated later it is the opinion on 
whether it is useful or not that is subjective.

> 1 Bitcoin transaction is said to be equivalent to 735121 Visa transactions
>
This is a bad comparison since it compares two things that are 
different. A bitcoin tx is just an secp256k1 over some input and output 
opcodes. So forming at tx is not energy intensive. Processing a tx 
involves verifying the signature and running the opcodes. So this is 
also not energy intensive. What is energy intensive is PoW. PoW is used 
to achieve consensus on the ordering of tx's and *protects* the ledger 
for being reordered. Visa also ultimately relies on protection by law's 
and enforcement of those laws by governments within who's jurisdiction 
it operates. Bitcoin doesn't have any reliance on protection from the 
state, so it must provide its own protection and it does this through 
PoW. A better comparison would be comparing bitcoin mining to the US 
military expenditures. I would agree that military expenditures are too 
high and war is very bad for the environment. The ability of governments 
to wage massive wars rest on their ability to 1) collect taxes and 2) 
manipulating the supply of money. While it is a long shot, cryptos such 
as bitcoin could be used to prevent or at least make it hard for 
governments to seize crypto assets from the citizens, which could 
ultimate hinder them from raising the capital needed to wage mass war. 
In this context seems to me to be an great use of excess energy.

BTW you can already mine bitcoin and monero with current packages.

> 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’?
Yes I agree, but it is quite clear what to expect from a GNU project. I 
agree with its stance on free software and that is why I use it.  Free 
software doesn't conflict with open source implementation of 
cryptocurrencies. I don't think it is fair to start add rules that ban 
software built with a particular political or ideological view point. It 
would be better to fork and create a new distro founded on your 
political and ideological principles. That way all newcomers could 
choose if participate and agree with the principles, instead of trying 
to force a participial ideological stance onto existing users that 
disagree with them.

> I suppose that technically, ‘don't mess up the planet’ is ‘controversial
> morality’
Once again agree we agree not to mess up the planet. But undermining the 
governments ability to raise tax and therefor to wage war or not 
expending energy to prevent government theft is the ‘controversial 
morality’ that I am sure can be agreed to death and which probably 
doesn't belong on this list.

2/20/22 17:52, Maxime Devos wrote:

> 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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