Razer's Terrible New Rewards Program Mines Cryptocurrency On Your PC

The internet can be a dangerous place, and if you’re not careful, you could end up unknowingly running crypto-miner malware.

- Ryan Whitwam

Alternatively, you could voluntarily install crypto-miner malware to earn fake coins and buy a new keyboard. Seriously, that is Razer’s new rewards program: It seems that Razer thinks its fans would like to donate their spare processing power to mine cryptocurrency for the company.

The massively ill-conceived endeavor is known as Razer SoftMiner, a Windows application you can download from Razer’s site. When you’re not using your PC, the software swings into action and uses your GPU to crunch numbers on the blockchain. Razer doesn’t say precisely what currency SoftMiner generates, but it’s probably Bitcoin.