Are there any security issues with setting the WP_INSTALLING constant to true?

Running Wordpress 4.1 on a CentOS 6.5 instance through VirtualBox as a dev server. When logged in as admin on both ssl and non-ssl sites Wordpress curl requests are taking a long time to run (45+ seconds overall before page loads). This renders my dev site unusable, as you can imagine.

While browsing around I found many people complaining of this extremely slow curl issue and I've discovered that setting the WP_INSTALLING constant to true speeds the site up 100%. I imagine it blocks all outgoing requests?

What are the consequences of setting this? I see that it breaks my front-end (admin side works well).

define('WP_INSTALLING', true);

Or, How can I just disable all outgoing requests? I profiled the page load and it appears that 65% of the hanging is due to curl requests. I just want to disable these external checks.