Norton Crypto. It's EVEN WORSE than you think....

Norton Crypto, yes that's what

they're actually calling it,

is only available with a

Norton 360 subscription.

So I begrudgingly handed over

my credit card to do something

that we basically tell everyone not to do.

Install Norton.

With that bitter pill swallowed,

we looked for the opt-in prompt,

the one asking if you

want to make some money

while your PC is idling, and we thought,

Hey, seems like a great idea.

Everybody loves free money and clicked it.

But how does it work?

Once it's enabled, after about

a minute of your GPU idling,

the Norton Crypto miner will turn on,

adding your graphics cards

power to an Ethereum mining pool

where it and every other Norton miner goes

to work digging for ether.

When a payout happens,

it gets split equally

amongst those in the pool,

depending on how much hash

rate they've contributed.

Now, this isn't anything new.

The first mining pool,

Slush Pool, came out in 2010

and consolidated machines to mine Bitcoin

in order to give the little guy

an edge over larger operations

by banding together.

Over the years,

more and more mining pool

operations have sprung up

and as long as you have

the computational power,

you're basically free to join.

But Norton had some innovative new ideas.

While most pools and

exchanges take a small one

or 2% cut of your mining profits to share

with the pool operator,

and many mining clients also

have small associated fees.

Norton figured,

Hey, we're already charging

you for Norton 360.

So let's disrupt the status

quo by charging wait,

15 (beep) percent.

Excuse me.

Even ignoring the paid nature

of their software compared

to basically any other

solution, 15% is outrageous.

And the worst part, is

we had to go digging

for this information.

At no point during the setup

process where we informed

of this fee. And we

even tried clicking the,

how does this work button,

but found only a brief FAQ

with basic explanations

for things like,

what is a blockchain?

And, how does mining work?

The fee was actually hidden

away in a support page

for Norton Crypto behind a dropdown.

There's just no respect

for the customer here.

Just a hidden middle finger

waiting to gouge your wallet.

I feel like you should spend your money

on lttstore.com instead.

Look at these sexy wan sweatpants.

It's time to put my feelings aside though.

Not every product is targeted

at enthusiasts like me

and you. So,

let's play a little game and say,

we're already paying for Norton 360

or it came free with

the purchase of our PC,

and we would rather trust

a big name we recognize

like Norton versus spending a

bunch of time doing research.

I mean, it's a couple of

clicks and who cares about 15%

if it's all profit anyway, right?

Why not let your GPU mine while

you're at work or sleeping?

Okay. So the app itself

is actually kind of okay.

It shows you the current US

dollar to Ethereum conversion,

the card that you'll be mining

on, its average hash rate

and both your daily and

monthly expected return.

This all seems great for the most part,

but it ignores some

basics like telling you

how much wattage your GPU is

pulling or more importantly,

factoring those power costs

into it's calculations.

It also doesn't bring up a

client window showing you

what exactly is going on.

When you join a pool on your own

or usually through a third party,

there's typically a client app involved

that shows you important stats

like, among other things,

hash rate, power

consumption, job acceptance

or network info like

latency or dropped packets

and it'll kind of scroll by as

your machine does it's thing.

Maybe that's too scary

for the target audience

or Norton felt it was unnecessary,

but whatever the case,

it's just not here.

Another missing feature

is any sort of optimizer.

Often when you're first

setting up a new minor,

you can run through an

optimization feature

that will try a number

of power, core clock

and memory clock settings

to get the best results

for your specific hardware.

It then saves a config file somewhere

that the miner can read

whenever it's booted up.

And if Norton is doing this

in the background somewhere,

it isn't very good.

You know what else probably

won't be very good?

Water cooling gear from wish.com.

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Now I know that a lot

of you consider NiceHash

to be controversial.

So we don't work with them in

a sponsored capacity anymore

and we're not promoting their use here.

But we needed a control

that we know is easy to use.

So we fired it up on our test bench,

which will have affiliate

links for down below,

first using NiceHash's QuickMiner

then for another hour with Norton Crypto.

And here's the thing, it's

normal for your return

to fluctuate somehow throughout the day,

but the results were staggering.

With Norton Crypto, our 20 80 super

on an open air test bench, hit 65 degrees,

pulled about, 160 watts

and saw a maximum hash rate

of 37.2 mega hashes per second.

With the QuickMiner,

after running OC tune,

we pulled about a hundred to 105 Watts,

hovered around 50 degrees Celsius

and had a higher hash

rate averaging closer

to 40 or even 45 mega hashes per second.

Now obviously the winner here

doesn't surprise us much.

Do we trust the experts or the newcomers?

But I did not expect a performance gap

the size of the Grand Canyon.

65 degrees might seem fine overall

but we anticipate a lot

of users to be on laptops

with hot components in a

more enclosed environment.

That 65 could easily turn into 80 degrees

or higher in the right

or wrong environment.

And don't forget that power is expensive

in some parts of the world.

So that 30 or $40 of monthly income

could come with a hefty power bill.

And you'll also be paying Gas Fees,

a small or sometimes not small fee

when you want to exchange your Ethereum.

And the best part

is that if the sucky

performance isn't enough

to keep you away,

there are even more problems

with one of the biggest being

how hard it is to remove Norton Crypto

from the rest of Norton 360.

Now actually enabling

the software is optional

but installing it isn't, and

to get rid of it, you need

to temporarily turn off Norton's

tamper protection feature,

then delete the encrypt executable.

Now some other users have

also mentioned things

just not working from time to time

or suddenly empty wallets,

both of which are frustrating

but, at least you can usually

find an answer from Norton

in the comments. So far,

it looks like they only have

plans to mine in Ethereum,

although they will look

at potentially adding

other currencies in the future.

In case you didn't know,

Ethereum is supposed to

go from proof-of-work,

which is what's currently happening

when you joined the mining

pool, to proof-of-stake,

which instead uses staked to Ethereum

to validate blockchains

and add new blocks.

It's meant to be much

more energy efficient,

but to be a staker, you need 32 ether,

about a hundred thousand us dollars worth.

Fear not though, staking

pools are already a thing.

So the little guy isn't

completely shut out

and the full transition has actually

been pushed back a number of times

but once it happens,

there's no telling what

Norton Crypto will do next.

Whatever it is,

I expect that it'll reflect

their obvious attitude over.