A Clever Tesla Owner Is Using His Model S to Mine Cryptocurrency for Free

Megalith

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A creative Tesla owner managed to fit a legitimate mining rig inside the trunk of his shiny Model S, and not only that, all the electricity needed to keep the mining rig running is coming from Tesla’s free Superchargers – or so the inventor says.

Another member of Tesla Owners Worldwide jokingly suggested fitting a miner inside a Model S could help avoiding huge energy bills by relying on electricity from the free Supercharger network. Well, someone thought this is indeed a good idea. Judging by the images, the mining rig in question uses GPUs to solve puzzles.
 
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RogueTadhg

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latest
 
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c3k

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I absolutely love the law of unintended consequences!!!

Kudos to this guy.
 
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cbutters

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Pretty sure this is fake.... note that there are no GPUs installed, nor power connected, not to mention, the fact that you would need well over 4000 watts (could be 6000 watts if those PSUs are 1500 watts) to power that many cards if they were all hooked up, which means it cannot run from a simple inverter (12v outlets in teslas run off of the standard 12V battery and would do 150 watts max.) Unless the owner claims to have found a way to tap into the high voltage battery. (pretty much unheard of for tesla vehicles at this point) Also think of the ramifications of running the equivalent of a 4000 watt space heater in the back of your car; (where is that heat going to dissipate? Are you going to leave your windows open 24/7?) Also, say it is running pulling 6 kW to mine. Also assume even a 100D Tesla. You've got 16 hours until you have to run back to the supercharger for another 1 hour session (and thats with no other battery used for driving). (how much is your time worth?) Totally impractical.

To me this looks like someone literally just threw some motherboards and riser cards in the back of a Model S for a clickbait article; however I would love to see more information on the engineering of this that proves me wrong.
 
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collegeboy69us

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+1 on this being fake.

There are no GPU's pictured.

But lets say someone did try to pull this off. Even with the beefiest of PSU's times 4 (what's seen in the pic) you are going to be pulling 3000-4000W of power. There's no way to pull that from the car unless you void your warranty and basically hack it. Want to throw a warranty away on a 70-100K car just so you can generate 40 or 50 dollars a day? If you are able to get the power tapped properly/safely, and Tesla somehow overlooks the energy usage with no miles being added to the car, cooling is another concern that makes the improbable and or impossible.

If he's in a northern climate and cool with leaving his windows down while its cold outside, that might work (but why leave a few 5 or 10K in GPU's exposed) if he seals up the car and relies on the HVAC to cool everything, good luck with it lasting more than a few days. it's not designed to cool a 3000-4000 heat load continuously 24/7 and it will break sooner rather than later. That warranty? hah you throw that out the window when you tapped into the car to get tons of juice.

Sounds to me like someone took a picture of some mining hardware in the truck as a joke, and the author of the article was dumb enough to fall for it as something serious.
 
dragonstongue

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is not exactly free, the car was purchased was it not :D

Now if they could take phantom power that is 100% truly wasted in the probably billions of watts annually and use that for "mining" now you are talking clever use of resources that are well, unused for any other purpose.
 
IcePickFreak

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I agree, fake. Besides, at that point why not just steal your neighbors power, or better yet just circumvent the power meter. Genius!
 
oldmanbal

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Tesla was well aware of abuse when they instituted the program. They certainly don't have an issue with keeping the lights on in the near future. Aside from the obviously questionable power source, this is otherwise a really interesting little project. Take out the cryptocurrency buzz words and it's still an incredibly fascinating pc mod.
 
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Following a few links in

Now a member of the Tesla Owner Worldwide group on Facebook jokingly suggested using the electricity aspect of Tesla’s vehicles instead of the computing power.

Another member of the forum took it more seriously and built a mining rig to fit the back of his Model S (picture credit: Michael Pearson‎):

Now that’s a setup for GPUs (though the GPUs are not installed) and therefore, it’s not likely to be used for bitcoins, but it could be used for other cryptocurrencies.
Click to expand...
So take it as it is, maybe he did really build it, as state GPUs are not installed, but didn't realize he couldn't power it, but who knows.
 
Mugato

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collegeboy69us said:
+1 on this being fake.

There are no GPU's pictured.

But lets say someone did try to pull this off. Even with the beefiest of PSU's times 4 (what's seen in the pic) you are going to be pulling 3000-4000W of power. There's no way to pull that from the car unless you void your warranty and basically hack it. Want to throw a warranty away on a 70-100K car just so you can generate 40 or 50 dollars a day? If you are able to get the power tapped properly/safely, and Tesla somehow overlooks the energy usage with no miles being added to the car, cooling is another concern that makes the improbable and or impossible.

If he's in a northern climate and cool with leaving his windows down while its cold outside, that might work (but why leave a few 5 or 10K in GPU's exposed) if he seals up the car and relies on the HVAC to cool everything, good luck with it lasting more than a few days. it's not designed to cool a 3000-4000 heat load continuously 24/7 and it will break sooner rather than later. That warranty? hah you throw that out the window when you tapped into the car to get tons of juice.

Sounds to me like someone took a picture of some mining hardware in the truck as a joke, and the author of the article was dumb enough to fall for it as something serious.
Click to expand...

I think you've got it, he was transporting his mining rig somewhere and the pic got out of hand. What, are the GPU's just chilling there on top of each other? No framing? That trunk would be around 110c wouldn't it? The only way I could think of this being a thing...maybe he has a jump starting device that is powered off of the car somehow? I don't know.
 
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Azphira

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What's next week, the person with the bit coin mining setup with the hidden extension cord running to his neighbor's never used exterior wall outlet behind their house?
 
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cpy2

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Thanks for informing us about another fake news site. Gotta warn people about those. Thenextweb is clearly a fake news site.
 
Sikkyu

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collegeboy69us said:
+1 on this being fake.

There are no GPU's pictured.

But lets say someone did try to pull this off. Even with the beefiest of PSU's times 4 (what's seen in the pic) you are going to be pulling 3000-4000W of power. There's no way to pull that from the car unless you void your warranty and basically hack it. Want to throw a warranty away on a 70-100K car just so you can generate 40 or 50 dollars a day? If you are able to get the power tapped properly/safely, and Tesla somehow overlooks the energy usage with no miles being added to the car, cooling is another concern that makes the improbable and or impossible.

If he's in a northern climate and cool with leaving his windows down while its cold outside, that might work (but why leave a few 5 or 10K in GPU's exposed) if he seals up the car and relies on the HVAC to cool everything, good luck with it lasting more than a few days. it's not designed to cool a 3000-4000 heat load continuously 24/7 and it will break sooner rather than later. That warranty? hah you throw that out the window when you tapped into the car to get tons of juice.

Sounds to me like someone took a picture of some mining hardware in the truck as a joke, and the author of the article was dumb enough to fall for it as something serious.
Click to expand...

You are overthinking this. He is parking this car at his house when mining and supercharging it every day. You don't need to expose anything. its safe and I assume he has a garage with a tesla.

Sure you have to drive to the supercharging station and charge up but that is easy enough. hook it up to some 4g network and you're golden, no downtime.

4000W is not a lot of power for what these cars use. these cars also have a camper mode for supplying power.
 
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DocNo

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Fake or not, it's not clever - just deceitful.

Which sadly seems to not only be accepted but applauded by some :(
 
jnemesh

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This is why we cant have nice things. This is a pretty blatant abuse of the system for personal gain, and I hope that this idiot is found out and loses his ability to use the charging stations!
 
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collegeboy69us

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Sikkyu said:
You are overthinking this. He is parking this car at his house when mining and supercharging it every day. You don't need to expose anything. its safe and I assume he has a garage with a tesla.

Sure you have to drive to the supercharging station and charge up but that is easy enough. hook it up to some 4g network and you're golden, no downtime.


4000W is not a lot of power for what these cars use. these cars also have a camper mode for supplying power.
Click to expand...

4000W isn't anything to the battery or the motors, but it's a metric ass ton for any 120V sourced plug/power strip you would need to plug into your run of the mill AT power supply for those rigs (over 4 PSU's) . The aux power output via the 12V isn't designed to output more than maybe 100W, so if you were going to draw the level of power needed to run a mining rig, you will be forced to hack your car to get to the connectors you need that.

Even if he's parking in his garage at night and hitting the supercharger each day, the amount of money involved here just isn't worth throwing your warranty away on a Tesla that expensive. Even if he's absolutely rich and can afford to trash a Tesla's warranty just to see if this works, it's still hilariously stupid. For the time/energy/waste involved here it's easier/cheaper to just buy the bitcoin.

I understand the whole approach of "can it be done" - we've all had projects like that, but if this is real and he's doing it because he thinks it's worthwhile... he might need to hope BTC hit's 30K for it to truly be a NET profit.
 
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sleepeeg3

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If you have the money to purchase the Model S in the first place, you would be better off taking that money, building that number of rigs, paying the extra electricity cost and taking whatever profit you gain from that in a few years to buy a Model S outright. This article looks fake and the idea stupid.
 
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knowom

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If you have the money to buy a Model S you have the money to terraform it into something more livable to mine with on this earth like planet.
 
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