- Everyone and their dog has tried to get into crypto
or blockchain technology somehow.
And I think it's now safe to say,
we have finally jumped the shark.
Norton, the infamous antivirus company
is no longer content to waste just a little bit
of your computer's resources.
Several months ago, they said,
you know what, screw it.
And injected their own cryptocurrency mining software
into Norton 360.
We gasped. We shouted. We cried.
And then,
because it's our job to try these things
so that you don't have to,
we resigned ourselves to installing it.
Leaving, only one question,
is it as good as my segue to today's sponsor?
Thanks to KiwiCo for sponsoring this video.
KiwiCo ships out crates that contained hands-on projects
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and problem solving skills.
Learn more at the end of this video
or at the link down below.
(upbeat music)
Right out of the gate, we're starting out strong here
because unlike basically every other mining software,
you've got to pay to play.
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.
Get subscribed so you don't miss that video.
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
there which is;
Hey, you're already stupid enough to waste your money
on our software, you're probably stupid enough
to share a disproportionate amount of your mining profits
with us.
Perhaps the worst part of all of this,
is the obvious conflict of interest that exists.
Norton has a clearly inferior product.
It performs worse and costs more,
but they can use their position as a trusted malware blocker
to allow their product to work while scaring users away
from better competing products.
But what they be so brazen as to do that, the answer is yes.
So I have no doubt that this endeavor
will be insanely profitable for Norton.
They get 15% of your ether and you pay for both the hardware
and the abnormally high power consumption.
I just can't figure out anyone else who is benefiting here.
Except maybe our sponsor.
Thanks KiwiCo for sponsoring today's video.
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Thanks for watching guys.
If you enjoyed this video and you want to get into mining
at home, maybe check out our mining adventure series
where we show you a much, much smarter way to do it.