Is WinMiner safe to use?

Is WinMiner safe? We surely think so!

( otherwise we would not be running it on our computer farms and our personal computers 🙂 )

WinMiner is created by SPEEDbit the team that invented Download Accelerator, the pioneering most popular download manager with over 400 million installs worldwide, to date.

WinMiner is an optimization application which we created to optimize income-generating tasks to every specific machine, making sure the most profitable task for each specific PC runs on that PC at any given time.

This is a complex endeavor which relies on third party tools and apps to perform different tasks.

In the first phase of WinMiner the tasks allocated are digital coin mining. Meaning we find and switch to the right coin to be mined for greatest profit for every PC at any moment.

The actual mining work is performed by applications called miners. We choose the best miners out there that we can find and run them on our server farm before assigning them to WInMiner users’ computers.

Some of those miners are open source and some are proprietary. They are all third-party software that have not been developed by us.

We have not found any harmful code in any of the miners we use, and we use them on our server farms, our work computers, our personal computers and on the personal computers of our friends and family members.

Having said that, we can not take any responsibility for a third party code nor provide any warranties to the operation of it or of WinMiner. You would find the same approach on almost any software out there by any vendor.

 

Is it possible that your security product will tell you that one of the miners we use is a virus and perhaps erase it? Could they be wrong?

Yes and Yes.

Here is why – miners are applications that consume computing power and can generate digital coins in return (that is why we chose them in the first place to monetize your unused computing power).

Until WinMiner came along, an average PC user could not have been expected to run a miner on his machine (as the whole process of running miners and generating income from that was for really advanced users and heavy-duty computers) so some security vendors considered an event in which a miner is running on a home machine as an unwanted situation (assuming its a result of an unintentional download by a user not being aware that a miner is running on his machine for the benefit of the evil entity that caused the unwanted download). That is why certain security vendors may erase the miner as an unwanted app/virus.

Advanced users would work around that by simply making an exception for the miner in their security app and so everyone was happy – simple users were protected from miners which are assumed to be unwanted; advanced users could enjoy the benefits of mining; and the security companies are protected because they oferred the protection.

With WinMiner we are bringing the benefits enjoyed so far only by advanced users to home users as well, so the scenario in which a miner is running on a home machine suddenly makes sense. However, this requires the security applications to adapt their rules to the new paradigm and this usually takes time…

In the meantime, if your security app prevents miners from running you will need to make an exception for the winminer folder for WinMiner to run properly. If you need help with that please reach out to help@winminer.com

Please let us know of any such incident so we can reach out to the security company and address the matter with them.

Lastly here is quote from Claymore, one of the leading mining experts out there and creator of the Claymore miner app, which we use in WinMiner –

“Windows 10 Defender recognizes miner as a virus, some antiviruses do the same. Miner is not a virus, add it to Defender exceptions.

  I write miners since 2014. Most of them are recognized as viruses by some paranoid antiviruses, perhaps because I pack my miners to protect them from disassembling, perhaps because some people include them into their botnets, or perhaps these antiviruses are not good, I don’t know. For these years, a lot of people used my miners and nobody confirmed that my miner stole anything or did something bad.

My miners are closed-source so I cannot prove that they are not viruses. If you think that I write viruses instead of good miners – do not use this miner, or at least use it on systems without any valuable data.”

Important: mining will stop on December 11 at 9am UTC