Shake your body – What if, instead of using specialized mining machines, the consensus of a cryptocurrency was made thanks to the work of your… (holy?) mind! It may seem far-fetched at first, but Microsoft believes in it, to the point of having filed a patent!
Human beings to replace asics!?
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) revealedthrough a publication this March 26, that the giant Microsoft has filed a patent application for a “cryptocurrency system using body activity data”.
The proposal is to use biometric data, to serve as validation for a crypto system in PoW:
Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user can be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. (…) A sensor can detect the user’s body activity. (…) The cryptocurrency system can check whether the body activity data satisfies one or more defined conditions (tasks), and award a cryptocurrency reward to the user whose body activity data is verified.
But actually, how does it work?
For those who remember this scene from the Matrix movie, don’t worry, it’s not about using humans as batteries. Here are some of the biometric data that this system could use:
Body activity can include, for example, radiation emitted by the human body, brain activity, flow of body fluids (e.g., blood flow), organ activity or movement, body movements (…) Body heat, pulse, or brain waves are sub-examples of radiation emitted by the human body.
You can imagine that the giant does not do this only for the beauty of science. We find out later that this system could, for example, be used to:
detect search terms that a subject has used or identified for the advertisement he or she has viewed.
Translated from Journal du coin
