Depends on what hardware they put in their cameras? I assume they aren't just using random IP cams, but deploying their own design? They could sneak in a cryptocoin ASIC for good measure.
Of course they most likely aren't doing that, but it's not out of the realm of possibility (and thus a missed opportunity to make this debacle peak cyberpunk).
Now that would be funny. However, would this not be fairly obvious to one of those sites doing tear downs? Then again, if found, would the PR one of those tear down sites could generate slow the sales down enough to make it a losing prospect for the manufacturer?
Non-techy people are willing to look so so far the other way in trade of convenience. Showing them "facts" about how much electricity their cameras are using would not impact the vast majority of the users if they feel like the service they are receiving is good enough.
Do we know that they don't? A dedicated ASIC would probably be spotted by some random person doing a teardown. But a DSP chip doubling as crypto miner when not in use, that could easily escape post-purchase hardware inspection.
(Might be easier to discover it on the design/procurement/supply chain side. Perhaps stock players would find out when investigating their investments. A high-profile brand putting crypto miners on consumer hardware is newsworthy, and news move stocks, so there's incentive to leak the story.)
If they can do god tier supply chain attack, dissipate the heat from mining hardware, add 4GB of RAM and put it in a form-factor that looks reasonable for a camera while still turning a profit, they can dedicate their genius to legitimate business ventures instead.
Most security cameras are PoE powered which gets you a whopping 13W of power that also has to run a sensor, IR LEDs, heaters, lens, RAM, etc. before you even choose the SoC and potentially your ASIC. How much computing power do you really think you can get with that?
So comparable to a smartphone under load. That's a pretty good power budget, given that most of the components you mentioned (except RAM/SoC) are going to be operated intermittently.
> sensor
Serious question: you mean image post-processing and encoding here? I thought CMOS sensors themselves have negligible power demands?
> heaters
A crypto miner is just that - an overcomplicated heater. If you include one, you don't need the other.
> How much computing power do you really think you can get with that?
Not much, though an ASIC would get a nice multiplier on it. I'd guesstimate it to be comparable to a cryptominer running in the browser of an unsuspecting regular person - who will typically have a cheap, underpowered machine that can barely lift the OS and the browser without hanging. In recent years, at least some people thought you can make a profit with it, because we've seen such web cryptominers deployed around the web.
My point isn't that it's happening - I fully expect the cost of sourcing a miner ASIC and redesigning a camera around it to be much larger than the mining it would bring in any reasonable timeframe. But I think that on first look, it's possible, if someone tried hard enough, to build a sneaky security camera like this, that would be able to eventually yield some profit if deployed wide enough.
Of course they most likely aren't doing that, but it's not out of the realm of possibility (and thus a missed opportunity to make this debacle peak cyberpunk).