Fresh off a Norton 360 controversy, Norton subsidiary Avira is also adding mining functionality for Ether to its antivirus product.
The company says that the feature, which is enabled (and disabled by default), is designed to "mine cryptocurrency in a safer and easier way" by bringing back idle processing power. Of course, security and convenience come with hefty fees, which reduces profits, which are already slim.
The basic premise is that your PC, and especially your GPU, could be put to better use doing other things, like mining Ethereum coins for Ethereum.
But there's a catch
The unfortunate thing about Norton's crypto mining plans is that Ethereum contains a structural weakness: gas fees (also known as transaction fees). According to Etherscan.io, you can expect to pay €33 to cover a single ETH transaction.
When combined with Norton's 15% reduction in mining, users will get next to nothing unless they fully commit their GPU to mining, increasing the power consumption costs associated with the process.
While other coins, such as Solana, seek to reduce these fees, they are a fact of the crypto world and in some ways an obstacle to its wider adoption. Consumers hate credit card fees, which are significantly lower than many ETH transactions.
On top of that, you're unlikely to mine that much. The Verge found that one night of ETH mining generated €0,66 in ETH and cost €0,66 in electricity, meaning they broke even.