Norton has faced a barrage of criticism for including the 360 cryptominer in its suite of apps. Although the company announced in advance that it would do so, the audience was not enthusiastic about the practice. At the same time, Norton claims that the miner is safe and reliable, but many have questions regarding the technical side and ethics.
Norton Crypto is disabled by default, but users are not happy that it is installed at all. Some are worried about security, others are suspicious of such practices, and others are, in principle, against cryptocurrency. There is also concern that the miner cannot be removed without difficulty.
The miner aims to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency together with other Norton users. A heavily embellished idea is that even those who don’t know cryptocurrencies can easily connect to the ecosystem thanks to software from a “trusted developer”. However, given that the market is full of suspicious mining programs, skepticism is justified.
Norton noted that their miner only works if it meets the requirements. If it is running on old hardware, it will not work. It turns out a situation: the miner is not mandatory, it works mostly transparently and is supported by a company with a fairly good reputation. However, there is of course one giant BUT here.
Norton takes 15% of all earnings. Which is shamelessly a lot. Most Ethereum pools charge between 1% and 2% + a very small percentage to the developer. It turns out that Norton is about seven times less profitable. And if you add in the high Ethereum transaction fees and electricity costs, it becomes clear that the average user will not receive significant income from such a scheme. But Norton will, since it collects 15% from all users and without doing anything receives a large amount of cryptocurrency. In some cases, using a Norton miner can lead to a loss at all.
But the biggest problem is that Norton Crypto can pull in people who don’t understand how cryptocurrency works at all. In fact, the company is shaking “free” money in front of those who can screw it up simply by their ignorance of how the industry works.