You can undermine a Bitcoin with the body heat of 44,000 people.

A Dutch research center has set up a Hell at the 'Matrix' to undermine cryptocurrencies.

The fact that Bitcoin is not really ideal for the environment is well known. In these days, a single Bitcoin transaction requires as much energy as 10 apartments in a week , and the whole network uses more energy than all of Bulgaria. The other currencies are not much better: Ethereum, the second cryptocurrency, uses as much energy as some small Mediterranean countries. It is no surprise, therefore, that some enthusiasts of cryptocurrencies have suggested the most sustainable solutions to generate the magic coin - a process called mining - like mines fueled by wind energy or Tesla cars .

A Dutch organization called the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) recently brought the issue of sustainability to the extremes using human heat to produce cryptocurrencies. But can our bodies really be a solution to the energy problems of the world?

"Last year the ecological impact of blockchain has been much discussed, because it has reached unprecedented levels of inefficiency and consumption per transaction," the artist and founder of IoHO Manuel Beltrán told me via email. "In many cases, when it is possible to build certain technologies, people simply use them uncritically, without considering the ethical or sociopolitical implications, and this is the challenge we are collecting."

The idea of ​​using body heat to feed the technology is not really new: now a lot of things, from gyms to discos are fed by these bags of sweaty meat. As reported by The Next Web in December, the IoHO experiment in collecting body heat was slightly different because, in reality, it did not require anyone to make physical efforts, such as running on a treadmill or dancing until fainting. In fact, the participants only had to lie down for a few hours at a time.

When it is at rest, an adult human body generates about 100 watts of power, and about 80 percent is wasted as excess body heat. The idea of ​​the IOHO is to capture part of this excess body heat using wearable thermoelectric generators. These generators convert body heat into electricity used to power computers that undermine cryptocurrencies.

Since 2015, 37 volunteers have contributed with 212 hours of mining for a total of 127.2 watts of power generated. Although volunteers contributed to the project over different time periods, on average each of them contributed around 0.6 watt / hour of energy. Given that the average adult man produces about 80 watts in the form of excess heat, this means that the IHO was able to effectively collect less than 1 percent of the body heat generated by its volunteers.
Because of the low amount of energy that the IHO was able to collect from volunteers, the organization has devoted a large part to the extraction of recent cryptocurrencies such as Vertcoin and Startcoin, as they required less energy. Beltrán explained that the volunteers could keep 80 percent of the cryptocurrencies generated, while the rest was left to the institute.

"We have never extracted bitcoins because it would be useless to produce them with human warmth," Beltrán told me. "We only extracted altcoin and the value of some of them has increased by over 46,000%, and those that were only a few cents at the beginning have now turned into a large amount of money."

This thing is absolutely right, but how useless would the IoHO system to undermine Bitcoin?

Suppose we are using an ASIC, a special chip used to extract Bitcoins. We take Antminer S9 as the reference ASIC because it is the most widespread as well as being efficient. An Antminer S9 consumes 1,375 watt-hours and affects about 0.6 bitcoins a year, so two of these devices would produce 1.2 bitcoins a year consuming 2,750 watt-hours.Since every human being generates 0.6 watt hours of energy at the IHO, the institute should take advantage of nearly 4,600 people who lie down for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to produce 1,2 bitcoins. If we rely on the current value of Bitcoin, each person could receive about $ 3 of reward for his one-year job.
It's not the best, but wearable thermoelectric generators have ample room for improvement. What about instead of an ideal scenario where generators are perfectly efficient and able to collect all the 80 watts of excess heat produced by the human body? Perhaps a structure similar to that of Matrix, where humans are immersed in a huge tub of sticky slime that collects all their energy?

In this scenario, a single individual could produce around 700,000 watt hours in a year. That is, if 34 people were spread out for a year and their excess body heat was collected at 100 percent efficiency, they could undermine 1.2 bitcoins. This proportion seems a little more advantageous, but a year in the volatile world of cryptocurrencies is equivalent to one thousand years for human beings.

If you would like to speed up the process and undermine a bitcoin a month, you would need around 320 people spending all day in a perfectly efficient facility. To undermine 1 bitcoin per month with IoHO technology, which in terms of efficiency is at the same level as the cheapest wearable thermoelectric generators available on the market, you would need about 44,000 people providing their body energy 24 hours a day, 7 days out of 7.
Naturally, the IoHO does not push for a future Matrix style . Rather, the project focuses on data ownership and how to effectively exploit its potential biological capital. It is an absolutely interesting experiment and it is not difficult to imagine a future in which everyone is wearing bodies that feed our phones implanted in the brain.

Until then, however, it seems that cryptocurrency miners will still have to content themselves with exploiting the old non-renewable energy sources.