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Tesla Owners Are Mining Bitcoins With Free Power From Charging Stations (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: Someone claimed to use their Tesla to power a cryptocurrency mine to take advantage of the free energy given to Tesla owners. But even with free energy, does this scheme make sense? Motherboard ran the numbers.
From the report: "...If we assume that each of the GPUs in this rig draws around 150 watts, then the 16 GPUs have a total power draw of 2.4 kilowatts per hour or 57.6 kilowatt hours per day if they ran for a full 24 hours. According to Green Car Reports, a Tesla Model S gets about 3 miles per kilowatt hour, meaning that running this mining rig for a full day is the equivalent of driving nearly 173 miles in the Tesla. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the average American drives around 260 miles a week. In other words, running this cryptocurrency mine out of the trunk of a Tesla for a day and a half would use as much energy as driving that Tesla for a full week, on average. Moreover, drivers who are not a part of Tesla's unlimited free energy program are limited to 400 kilowatt hours of free electricity per year, meaning they could only run their rig for a little over 7 days on free energy.
Okay, but how about the cost? Let's assume that this person is mining Ethereum with their GPUs. Out of the box, an average GPU can do about 20 megahashes per second on the Ethereum network (that is, performing a math problem known as hashing 20 million times per second). This Tesla rig, then, would have a total hashrate of about 320 megahashes. According to the Cryptocompare profitability calculator, if the Tesla rig was used to mine Ethereum using free electricity, it would result in about .05 Ether per day -- equivalent to nearly $23, going by current prices at the time of writing. In a month, this would result in $675 in profit, or about the monthly lease for a Tesla Model S. So the Tesla would pay for itself, assuming the owner never drove it or used it for anything other than mining Ethereum, Ethereum doesn't drop in value below $450, and the Tesla owner gets all of their energy for free." Motherboard also notes that this conclusion "doesn't take into account the price of each of the mining rigs, which likely cost about $1,000 each, depending on the quality of the GPUs used." TL;DR: Mining cryptocurrency out of your electric car is not worth it.
From the report: "...If we assume that each of the GPUs in this rig draws around 150 watts, then the 16 GPUs have a total power draw of 2.4 kilowatts per hour or 57.6 kilowatt hours per day if they ran for a full 24 hours. According to Green Car Reports, a Tesla Model S gets about 3 miles per kilowatt hour, meaning that running this mining rig for a full day is the equivalent of driving nearly 173 miles in the Tesla. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the average American drives around 260 miles a week. In other words, running this cryptocurrency mine out of the trunk of a Tesla for a day and a half would use as much energy as driving that Tesla for a full week, on average. Moreover, drivers who are not a part of Tesla's unlimited free energy program are limited to 400 kilowatt hours of free electricity per year, meaning they could only run their rig for a little over 7 days on free energy.
Okay, but how about the cost? Let's assume that this person is mining Ethereum with their GPUs. Out of the box, an average GPU can do about 20 megahashes per second on the Ethereum network (that is, performing a math problem known as hashing 20 million times per second). This Tesla rig, then, would have a total hashrate of about 320 megahashes. According to the Cryptocompare profitability calculator, if the Tesla rig was used to mine Ethereum using free electricity, it would result in about .05 Ether per day -- equivalent to nearly $23, going by current prices at the time of writing. In a month, this would result in $675 in profit, or about the monthly lease for a Tesla Model S. So the Tesla would pay for itself, assuming the owner never drove it or used it for anything other than mining Ethereum, Ethereum doesn't drop in value below $450, and the Tesla owner gets all of their energy for free." Motherboard also notes that this conclusion "doesn't take into account the price of each of the mining rigs, which likely cost about $1,000 each, depending on the quality of the GPUs used." TL;DR: Mining cryptocurrency out of your electric car is not worth it.
People will always take a mile when given an inch.
I guess Tesla realized this might happen, and that's why they stopped giving out free supercharger access. An alternate fix would be to deny supercharging if the number of miles drivenon the last charge is too low compared to the amount of energy that's been used.
If my eco-friendly place of employment offers free power for charging during my workday I don't have a 400-kilowatt-hours-per-year limit, I can make closer to $708.75 a month and run my rig for every workday of the month. I could also plug it in at home and run it some more during my evening if I wanted to, but at least this way, I cut my production costs by 1/3rd. And if my eco-friendly apartment complex also offers free power? Now I'm *really* making some extra coin (pun intended.)
but it's really clever, too.
...
Nothing like throwing REAL resources (coal, oil, gas) used for power generation into basically 1's and 0's that someone says are worth $10000 for each BTC. What the fuck? How broken do you have to be to chase NOTHING with something?
Has anyone actually tried to get $10k for a BTC? I'd really like to see someone post they actually cashed out BTC into US Dollars. Last YouTube video I watched on the subject has an fascinating conclusion: It was plenty easy to put cash into the BTC ATM in San Francisco and therefore get a BTC sent to your BTC wallet, but when the guy went to convert the remaining BTC to back to cash (US Dollars).. well... it never happened. He gave up.
I can actually imagine Tesla offering a feature to mine bitcoin with the car's automated driving system. The NVidia processor used is likely suitable for it and designed with at least some consideration for reducing power usage. It could be set to mine only when hooked to AC power, thus not costing Tesla anything extra.
The publicity could be interesting and even add to the idea that Musk secretly created Bitcoin. With a little Musk hype, it would be a fun feature or easter egg.
It might even result in more people opting to pay the extra fee to have the self-driving hardware installed at purchase.
57.6 kilowatt hours per day
57.6 KJ/s * 3600 s/h * 24h/day = 49,000 MJ/day ? I always mess up kilowatt-hours.
When the revolution comes, bitcoin owners will be first against the wall. Actually, they'll be second against the wall, immediately after billionaire Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his trophy wife who took pictures of themselves at the mint rubbing fresh currency on themselves to get off.
And it will be easy to know who owns bitcoins, BECAUSE THEY CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY OWN BITCOINS.
You are welcome on my lawn.
or you could run three bitcoin asics (~$1000 each) and generate $1200/month on roughly the same amount of power
Um a 16 card mining rig is going to cost about 15k not sure where he is getting his hardware from but i want to go there..
Back with the Prius first came out, I read a story about how the battery voltage (somewhere between 100 and 200V DC) could easily drive almost any computer power supply DIRECTLY, no modifications required. This guy figured out that he could run his whole Ham Radio station and computers using his 2nd hand Prius as a source of backup power. Said it had a really nice battery capacity and you could just let the motor run to charge it now and then. I don't suppose a Tesla would be much different, except you won't have the backup generator part.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The original post states "So the Tesla would pay for itself, assuming the owner never drove it or used it for anything other than mining Ethereum"; WHY? Drawing 2.4KW is like running the heater full blast, the car is capable of significantly more than that. There is absolutely no reason why you'd need to leave the car parked to mine. You simply just need to charge an extra 60KWh per day to sustain the 24/7 mining. Whether you do it once a day, or on multiple stops, it doesn't matter as long as you never know run the battery to 0%. Charging multiple times a day would actually result in less time spent charging as Tesla's can supercharge at 120KW when battery is low, but slows down as the battery gets fuller.
Of course, the whole idea is still silly. Where I live 60KWh costs $6 at home. There are places where it costs as low as $3. $3-$6 per day is not worth an hour or longer per day spent going to a supercharger. Yes, I know the article states $23 profit, but if you can plug it in at home for $3, then the Tesla only makes $3 per day, the rest can be made without the Tesla at home.
This raises other questions though: What if you buy one of those Tesla home batteries, go off the grid, and instead of buying solar panels and/or supplementing your usage from the grid, you buy an old junky but running Tesla to go back and forth to charge your home? Of course assumes you have a charging station around the corner to make it convenient.
BTW, the bit mining scenario non-feasibility assumes a new model S, whereas the better scenario is a really old model to make the numbers crunch.
Way to waste energy!
Apparently people care enough to run electrical car with Tesla but, at the same time, would consider wasting energy to produce cash. Because it is a total waste of energy per se, it is just burned.
Really? Seriously, WTF people? What happened to "News for nerds"?
PRO-TIP: If you're using Power/Time as a unit, you're probably doing it very wrong.
Climate change and peak oil are huge problems, they're coming at full speed and we're still not able to write correct units for power and energy?
I am not particularly interested in all what refers to investments, financial whatever, bitcoin, etc., but after having read so many posts here and just out of pure curiosity I want to know if I have got all this right. Basically, I understand that the whole system works as follows:
- On one hand, you have the mining part where apparently only the big mining companies or the ones selling mining machines really earn money. The remaining miners have to put a relevant amount of money upfront to buy a hardware which will only work for the purpose of mining. They have to let these machines working for as long as possible by paying the electricity bills and hoping that the mining returns will be kept more or less constant.
- On the other hand, you have people buying whatever bitcoin and waiting for its price to go as high as possible; what seems to be the case lately, but what might suddenly change for no good reason. In an extreme scenario where the given currency completely collapses, there will be no institution/government somehow minimising those effects; there are also no relevant regulations/limitations avoiding abusive behaviours or, in general, anything actually ensuring certain medium-term stability. People can easily buy bitcoins, but cannot immediately convert them into a national currency; there is either some waiting period (+ a small commission) or a relevant commission. So, it seems that, in order to earn something with bitcoins, you would need to buy a relevant amount of them, wait a relevant amount of time and hope that the prices will continue increasing. Something like stock trading, but with a much more limited public information regarding what is the expected evolution and virtually no regulation?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Winter is here...Russians did use mining for heating houses. That seems as reasonable thing to do as long as mining equipment isn't too expensive.
The subtle difference is that a few of the "precious" metal, have at least some value in them (due to their physico-chemical properties) making them remotely interesting.
Gold, doesn't oxidize and remains gold for most of its life (as opposed to iron which rust).
Silver doesn't oxidize that much.
Silver has interesting chemical properties making it useful to sterilize water.
etc.
Make a long list of there and you find that as metals, they aren't completely useless.
Now, add to that the fact they are rare and hard to obtain
(this was also part of the reason why Aluminium used to be a precious metal before the industrial revolution : it's tremendously energy consuming to smelt bauxite ore into metallic aluminium, and was hard to obtain back then).
They are thus desirable and you can understand a small part of the reason while they are valuated.
(though they are completely over valuated, when you compare their market value with their actual usefulness).
Bitcoins are even worse, in that they are not physical objects and have no intrinsic use.
The only minimal usefulness making the whole system a tiny bit desirable is that the bitcoin protocol is extremely useful (no central authority but distributed ledger instead).
But you have some minute desirability, because of the usefulness of the protocol, and thus speculators jumping on the bandwagon and blowing the over-valuation through the moon.
It has the potential of one day maybe having some value (again, it's a desirable payment system, because of its distributed nature) so in some future potential timeline where its transaction volume is similar to paypal or credit cards, it would make market sense that BTCs got some value. But currently it's quite over-valuated.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
fucking rich guys...
Quit my real job. I love these kind of idiots though. It prevents the stampede of people mining and trading. I talk to people all the time who say things like well duke_cheetah2003 said it's stupid and I can make money mining or trading. Well I say nothing as I'd prefer nobody else but me do it.
more proof, that when you innovate, someone somewhere is not going to like it.
And most of us can guess who those people are usually going to be.