Siraj Rawal from San Francisco tried almost every possible way to mine cryptocurrency on his Tesla Model 3 2018. He ran a free bitcoin mining program on his Apple Mac mini M1 and powered the computer by connecting an inverter to a 12-volt outlet in his car.
He also connected several GPUs to the front end of his Tesla and ran them from the car’s internal battery.
While this may void his car’s warranty, Raval says it’s worth it. When the price of ether peaked in 2021, he was mining $800 a month.
Another bitcoin miner, Alejandro de la Torre, said that, ultimately, mining with Tesla is no different than plugging into any other power source:
How to mine with tesla
Back in 2018, Chris Alessi, known as K-Man on his YouTube channel, decided to tinker with his Tesla. This was nothing new to him: in his spare time, he modifies electric cars to order and calls himself the modern-day Doc Brown, a Back to the Future character who can turn a car into a time machine.
Like Raval, Alessi has tried several ways to turn his Tesla Model S into a mining rig. In fact, all you need here is a powerful computer and a power source, and the car has both of them. He first mined bitcoins by connecting the Bitmain Antminer S9 ASIC directly to his car battery using a power inverter. The inverter regulated Tesla’s battery voltage to a level compatible with Antminer.
Chris Alessi
Alessi has also successfully used the car’s internal firmware to mine altcoins. He simply went from the console of the machine to a website that he created specifically for the extraction of the monero token. And I launched the mining program in the Tesla browser. In this way, he got several hundred dollars on the built-in computer of the machine.
According to him, of all Tesla mining methods, the most profitable is the combination of hacking the car’s internal computer and connecting the GPU directly to the car’s electric motor.
Siraj Rawal:
Tesla is a computer with wheels… Hacking this car is so easy.
You have the power supply, you have the space, you have the option to add cooling. And the battery has more than enough power to run the ASICs and keep them running smoothly.
Raval says he’s hacking the car’s firmware to give his GPUs even more power. As a result, the car produces more than 100 kilowatts, Raval connects five graphics processors to the battery and starts the ether mining algorithms. Profit!
