The opportunity to get rich is here! Just collect body temperature and receive 1 Bitcoin a month

Compared with the obvious costs of industrialization, it seems easy for us to forget the impact of the digital age on the environment and humans. For example, it takes a huge amount of energy to support the operation of the Internet (network servers and data centers), and companies like Google exchange services for our data. Machine algorithms based on data and artificial intelligence will change the relationship between people and labor in the future.

The cryptocurrency, whose price surged last year, is a classic example of the impact of the digital age on the environment. It was previously reported that a single Bitcoin transaction consumes the energy of 10 households for a week, more than the energy consumption of Bulgaria alone. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, also consumes more electricity than some small Mediterranean countries, such as Cyprus.

As for why it consumes so much electricity, the simple answer is that the core of cryptocurrency requires a large number of computers to execute encryption algorithms day and night to verify transactions conducted online (this process is also called mining), which requires a lot of energy consumption.

It’s no secret that digital currencies are bad for the environment, and many crypto enthusiasts have been looking for more sustainable solutions to reduce the cost of online mining, such as building a wind rig to “mine” or using a Tesla to power mining equipment.

However, these ideas are not extreme enough. An organization called the Human Aging Research Institute in the Netherlands recently decided to mine various cryptocurrencies by collecting human body heat. The process goes like this:

Image source: Biological Labour - IoHO - Elevate Festival at esc medien kunst labor (the same below)

so:

There is also this:

"There has been a lot of discussion over the past year about maintaining the Bitcoin blockchain ecosystem," IoHO founder and artist Manuel Beltr said in an email to VICE. "Most of the time, if a technology works, people will just build it and start using it without thinking about the ethical and social impacts that the technology might bring. This is exactly what we want to challenge."

The idea of ​​using body heat to power the world around us isn’t new. There have been gyms powered by people moving, and dance halls powered by constant dancing. But IoHO’s experiment in harvesting body heat is slightly different because it doesn’t actually require people to do any physical activity; participants can just lie down for a few hours at a time.

An adult's body generates about 100 watts of energy at rest, 80% of which is wasted as excess body heat. The idea is to use a wearable thermoelectric generator to capture this body heat and convert it into electricity to mine cryptocurrency.

The project is currently being tested in Europe, with 37 volunteers contributing 212 hours of mining time since 2015, generating a total of 127.2 watts of electricity.

Although volunteers contributed their bodies for different amounts of time, on average each volunteer contributed about 0.6 watts of energy per hour. This means that IoHO is currently effectively harvesting less than 1% of body heat from each person.

Since the IoHO receives very little energy from volunteers, the organization mainly uses this energy to mine new cryptocurrencies, such as Vertcoin and Startcoin, which use much less energy than Bitcoin.

Because at the current success rate, the project would require 44,000 people to provide their physical energy 24/7 for a month to afford one Bitcoin.

That still sounds like too little. However, there is still a lot of room for improvement in wearable thermoelectric generators. If the generator efficiency is improved to collect all the excess heat of the body (80 watts), then mining Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies will be much faster. If I continue to talk about it, I think of the human energy harvesting element in "The Matrix"...

In a way, it is a utopian way to make money - you don’t have to do anything, you can mine coins while lying in bed. But in terms of efficiency, it is still far from becoming a regular job and buying cryptocurrency.

However, the purpose of the project creators is not to make participants make money quickly, but to make people think about data ownership and how to effectively use a person's biological capital. The experiment itself is interesting, and it is not difficult to imagine that in the future we wear this "clothing" to power implants in our bodies (if any).

But when it comes to the huge energy consumption of the cryptocurrency world, our bodies seem too fragile.