My brother's response to:

A Dutch organization called the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) recently took the fantasy of sustainable cryptocurrencies to its extreme by harvesting human body heat to mine a variety of cryptocurrencies. But could our bodies really be a viable solution to the cryptocurrency world’s energy problems?

Would be a neat idea if the conditions didn't require humans to lay there in a vegetative state - unless those volunteers were napping.

Due to the small amount of energy that the IoHO was able to harvest from the volunteers, the organization mostly dedicated this energy to mining new cryptocurrencies such as Vertcoin and Startcoin since it required less energy to mine a relatively large number of these coins. According to Beltrán, volunteers kept 80 percent of the cryptocurrencies they generated while the rest was given to the institute.

"We never mined bitcoins because it would be useless to produce them with human heat," Beltrán told me. "We exclusively mined altcoins and some of them have risen over 46,000% in value. What in the beginning was just small cents now became substantial amounts of money."

That’s fine and well, but just how useless would the IoHO’s system be if used to mine Bitcoin?

Let’s assume that we’re using an ASIC, a special type of computer chip for mining Bitcoin. We’ll take the Antminer S9 as a benchmark ASIC because of its popularity and efficiency. An Antminer S9 uses 1,375 watthours and mines about 0.6 bitcoins per year, so two of these devices would produce 1.2 Bitcoin a year and require 2,750 watthours.