With the ever-increasing competition, mining now requires specific, powerful rigs that usually cost thousands of dollars - but there are unconventional ways users can earn some money with crypto mining without having to buy mining devices.

Crypto mining started as a simple job of validating transactions and creating new tokens in the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism using a small amount of computing power. It has, however, gotten much pricier to do it with time. Still, amateur miners have found a couple of novel mining methods.

One of them is using the Norton 360 antivirus. The popular antivirus product has released Norton Crypto, a feature that enables users to mine crypto using their PC when it is idle.

Notably, the feature is limited to devices that meet some requirements like having at least 2 GB RAM and a 1 GHz processor.

"The coin mining fee is currently 15% of the crypto allocated to the miner," Norton detailed, adding that other extra costs like gas fees and swap fees would be on users.

As of now, Norton Crypto only supports mining ethereum (ETH). The platform creates a digital Ethereum wallet for users and then encrypts and stores it in the cloud.

"We will look at potentially adding other currencies in the future," Norton said.

Meanwhile, some Tesla owners have been using their electric cars to mine cryptocurrencies. According to a report by CNBC, Chris Allessi, who was Wisconsin’s first-ever electric car dealer and does all sorts of engineering with electric cars, started to mine crypto with his Tesla in 2018.

“I like electricity. I like zapping stuff, building stuff. You give me an electric motor, I give you a finished product,” Allessi said, who has tried mining Bitcoin (BTC) by plugging a mining rig directly into