Cryptocurrency mining has become a very profitable business for those who have high-end graphics cards. Mining bitcoin at home has not been profitable for 8 years, but Ethereum is still profitable. And antiviruses have wanted to join this trend with the excuse of being “safe”. Are antiviruses reliable for mining? How much commission do they take?
There are currently two antiviruses that allow you to mine cryptocurrencies with them: Norton and Avira, which have the corresponding Norton Crypto and Avira Crypto tools implemented. With them, you can mine Ethereum directly from the antivirus without using scripts.
Norton Crypto
To access Norton Crypto, to begin with, it is necessary to pay for Norton 360 in its Deluxe mode, which costs 34.99 euros during the first year , going on to cost 94.99 euros afterwards . The subscription includes the antivirus, 50 GB of cloud storage, firewall, password manager, VPN, etc. Basically everything can be achieved separately with better and cheaper or free services.
When installing the antivirus, a message appears asking if you want to earn money while you are not using the computer , without mentioning at any time that it is a mining script. The problem with doing this is that, although it may seem more comfortable and secure at first, you are actually losing a lot of money along the way. Participating in a mining pool like NiceHash or Ethermine guarantees us 99% of our income, where the pool takes only 1%, or up to 3% depending on the pool we use. Instead, Norton Crypto takes a whopping 15% of everything we mine .
A pool is currently vital to mine cryptocurrencies, since separately it will never be possible to mine the necessary block to obtain the reward. Norton uses its own pool, activating when the computer has been idle for a minute to start mining Ethereum . The program shows the performance of what we have mined, and the estimated daily and monthly earnings. The hashrate and the percentage of utilization of the graphics card are also displayed.
The problem with using this solution is that, in order to mine cryptocurrencies , it is necessary to adjust the parameters of the graphics card so that it consumes less and has a higher performance. To reduce consumption, you can limit the maximum power to 60% of the maximum, and to increase performance you can overclock the memory.
Thus, with Norton Crypto without touching the graphics settings, the temperature of an RTX 3070 can reach 80 degrees, and mine at 52 MH/s consuming more than 200 W. Touching the settings, the hashrate can be 62 MH/s. s, with a temperature of 57 degrees and consuming 132 W. Therefore, mining with an antivirus does not make sense, and it is important to check the antivirus settings to make sure that an antivirus company is not stealing bandwidth.
To delete Norton Crypto , you need to disable antivirus protection and manually delete the executable, so they don’t make it easy at all.
Avira Crypto
The other antivirus that allows you to mine cryptocurrencies in it is Avira Crypto . The company has practically copied the functionality of Norton Crypto, with the same interface and 15% commissions. It would not be surprising if they were using the same cryptocurrency mining software or code as Norton.
The “advantage” of Avira Crypto is that it is free , since it is included in all the modalities of the program, including the paid ones. However, it seems that it is not active in Spain yet, so it may not work for you. Like Norton, it will only work if you turn it on, although you may do this by accident. Therefore, if you use one of the two programs, check if it has been activated inadvertently. If you want to mine, you better use pools and adjust the performance of your card.
