If Windows blocks Brisvia

Why this happens

Two different things get confused here, and it is worth separating them.

1. 1Windows does not know who published Brisvia.Commercial software carries a signature that names its publisher. That signature costs money and takes weeks of identity checks. Brisvia is being signed right now, but until every copy carries it, Windows shows a warning for an unknown publisher. The warning is about the missing name, not about the contents of the file.
2. 2Brisvia really does contain a miner.That is the whole point of it. Some antivirus products flag any mining software on sight, because miners are often installed on people's machines without asking. Brisvia never mines behind your back — it ships switched off, it shows you exactly how much of your processor it is using, and one button stops it. But a scanner that only looks for "does this mine?" will answer yes, and it is not wrong to.

Chrome blocked the download

You see a red bar saying the file is dangerous or was blocked, and the download never finishes. This one catches most people, because it happens before you have the file at all.

1. Open Chrome's downloads with Ctrl + J.
2. Find the Brisvia entry and click Keep (on some versions: the three dots, then Keep anyway).
3. If Chrome asks again, confirm. The download will finish normally.

Then do the check below before you run it. A browser warning is a good moment to verify, not a good moment to click through blindly.

"Windows protected your PC"

A blue window appears when you run the installer, and it looks like there is no way forward. There is — the button is hidden.

1. Click More info in that blue window.
2. A new button appears at the bottom: Run anyway.
3. The installer opens as usual.

Brisvia installs, but then fails or a part of it disappears

This is the most confusing case, and the one that wastes people's evenings. Brisvia is not a single file: it carries its own network component and its own mining component in a binaries subfolder. An antivirus can quarantine one of those and leave the main program untouched, so Brisvia opens fine and then fails at some specific step — creating a wallet, connecting, or mining.

If Brisvia 1.1.0 or newer tells you it cannot reach one of its own components, or that a part of the program is missing, this is what happened. Older versions just said the operation failed, which explained nothing.

1. Open Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Protection history.
2. Look for a recent quarantine entry naming bitcoind.exe, brisvia-worker.exe or brisvia-miner.exe.
3. Before restoring anything, verify the download using the section below. Restoring a file you have not checked is how real infections survive.
4. Once it checks out, restore that file and add an exclusion for that exact file — not for the whole Brisvia folder. A folder-wide exclusion leaves a permanent blind spot on your machine that anything could later use.
5. Open Brisvia again.

If your antivirus is not Windows Defender, the same idea applies: find its quarantine list, verify first, then authorise the specific file.

Check that what you downloaded is really ours

Every file we publish has a fingerprint — a long string of characters that changes completely if even one byte of the file is different. We publish ours next to each download. If yours matches, the file left our hands exactly as you received it. If it does not match, delete it and download again from this site only.

1. Open PowerShell in the folder where the file is.
2. Run: Get-FileHash .\Brisvia.Miner_1.1.0_x64-setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256
3. Compare the result with the fingerprint published on the downloads page. Upper- and lower-case do not matter; every character does.

The same check works on macOS and Linux with shasum -a 256 file or sha256sum file.

Why you should be able to trust this, beyond our word

"Trust us, it is a false positive" is what every piece of malware says. So here is what you can check instead of trusting us.

1. 1The source code is public.Both the coin and the app are on GitHub. Anyone can read what it does and build it themselves: github.com/brisvia/brisvia-desktop.
2. 2Mining is off until you turn it on.Brisvia does not mine on install, does not mine in the background, and does not start with Windows unless you ask it to.
3. 3You can see and stop what it is using.The app shows how much of your processor is working and lets you cap it or stop it at any moment.
4. 4Uninstalling removes it.There is a normal uninstaller. Nothing keeps running afterwards.
5. 5Your 12 words never leave your machine.Brisvia has no account and no server holding your wallet. See security.

What we are doing about it

A code signing certificate has been bought and is going through identity verification. Once it is issued, every file we publish will carry the publisher's real name.

We would rather say this plainly than promise too much: signing does not make the warnings vanish overnight. Microsoft's own documentation says a properly signed file can still be shown as unrecognised until it has been downloaded enough times to build a reputation. What changes is that the reputation accumulates under one verified identity and carries across versions, instead of every release starting from zero.

Still stuck?

Tell us what you see — the exact wording of the message and which step it happens at. Being told "it does not work" cannot be acted on; being told which component was quarantined can be fixed the same day.