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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.

2 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re: What a waste! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    SO you are telling me if I had bitcoins I could use this Bitcoin ATM and withdraw 1 bitcoins worth of money; and that machine will spit out what it's worth (~$10k). So a 1 coin a day limit according to you.

    I highly fucking doubt it. I need more proof. Let's say someone gets wind of a crash coming. They withdraw $10k from 100 different wallets and leave the ATM dealers with the bag? And that's the first scenario I thought of. I thought anything over $10k has to be reported to the Feds. How much money do these atms even have in them? Also, I thought when you use Bitcoin it takes time for the transaction to go thru. How long does a $10k transaction take? Converting 1 Bitcoin into $10,000.

    I'm sorry, im not claiming Bitcoin atms don't exist. Because I've withnessed them. I'm claiming that a $10k per day limit is fucking a stupid idea and doubt that's how it works. So far none of you have provided any proof. One person linked a how to on how to convert Bitcoin, lul. And you posted about a Bitcoin ATM near your house with a $10k a day limit. How convenient that the limit is now 1 bitcoins worth.

    So in closing, please provide me some solid evidence that this $10k a day limit Bitcoin ATM exist. Thank you.

  2. Re:What a waste! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    People regularly sell BTC for that kind of money. Often it's small fractions of a BTC, say 0.1 BTC for $1000, but there are big transactions as well.

    Most people don't use ATMs, they use online services that shuffle money electronically.

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