More difficult than short sellers? Tesla CEO’s new “enemy” may be Bitcoin miners

Tesla CEO Musk has accused short sellers of trying to kill the company more than once this year. Recently, he may have a new "enemy" to cause trouble: Bitcoin miners.

EcoMotoring News, an energy-saving automobile news and analysis blog, recently revealed that some creative Tesla owners have come up with a new way to make money: using electric vehicles to power "mining" digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

Take Bitcoin, for example, whose trading price has increased by nearly 1,000% this year. Mining is essentially a competition for the right to record blockchain transactions. Miners who are the first to record Bitcoin transactions can receive certain Bitcoin rewards. However, mining is a very energy-intensive job.

Wall Street Journal cited data last week that Bitcoin mining currently consumes more electricity than 159 countries and regions around the world. At the current rate of increase, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world's electricity in February 2020.

Image source: powercompare

The EcoMotoring News article mentioned that as mining profits decline, some miners are trying to reduce the cost of "mining" computers.

“To increase their already slim profits, miners see any source of electricity that they don’t have to pay for at regular rates, or at all, as an opportunity. Tesla and other electric vehicles have free access to electricity at multiple charging stations, so it was only a matter of time before someone decided to plug their mining computers into it.”

The above article also mentioned that a Tesla car owner posted the following photos of the modified car interior configuration. Some other car owners estimated that his setup could only obtain a maximum of 3 kilowatts of electricity, and he might need to turn on the air conditioning in the car to cool it down.

Regarding the ethical issues of whether this practice is stealing electricity for purposes other than driving, the article believes that Bitcoin mining should not be blamed alone. The energy demand for computing is increasing. Self-driving cars are already using graphics processing units (GPUs) that were once common to Bitcoin miners, and mobile devices will also require more power.

Moreover, these problems caused by power shortage will not only occur in electric vehicles, but will also affect hybrid vehicles and conventional vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel.

The article believes that through these issues with expanding influence, we can find that Bitcoin mining is obviously just the tip of the iceberg. Even if a large number of electric car owners "steal electricity" in the above way, it is dwarfed by the final energy consumption of future cars that require computing power.