Yesterday I had a total what the heck moment when I received a message from forum user Angantyr informing me that Razer partnered with a company called "GammaNow", their plans are this, they want you to use their mining software. You mine for it, and Razer keeps the coins. 

You, however, would receive points in a loyalty program for some discounts. So let me reiterate, Razer wants you to dig crypto coins in exchange for a discount at the company. Users would use their computers to create digital coins, although they are not allowed to keep them themselves. The project is called Softminer. Users can download a program that uses the hardware of their system to extract cryptocurrency. These are coins that resemble Ethereum coins.

In exchange for the mining, users get Razer Silver. These are not crypto coins themselves, but points that can be exchanged in Razers own webshop. This allows users to receive discounts on new products. It is not clear how many Razer Silver points are worth and how many discount users can get.

Users react surprised at Twitter. According to Razer, consumers can generate 500 Razer Silver credits or more in a day over the SoftMiner app. Unfortunately, 500 credits isn't enough to obtain any gaming hardware from Razer's rewards program. You'll need 51,000 credits to get the vendor's DeathAdder gaming mouse. Razer's Huntsman Elite keyboard, on the other hand, goes for 280,000 credits. Assuming you generated 500 credits a day, that means you'd need to let the Softminer app run for 560 days to obtain the Huntsman Elite keyboard, which retails for $199.

The extraction of crypto coins is known to consume a lot of energy and to wear out hardware faster. Let's hope, that razer won't silently embed the SoftMiner into their hardware application software. What a hideous idea. No, just no. 

Razer SoftMiner uses your GPU to mine cryptocurrency