And then comes the bio-crypt-economy, with patents on great technologies for your body to 'mine' cryptocurrencies

Cryptography and socioeconomics gave themselves the "I do" officiated by the enigmatic Satoshi-Nakamoto, and thus intertwined their destinies forever and ever, bringing to the world a whole spawn of disruptive innovations, with multiple and great advantages, and some disadvantages that are not exactly negligible.

But now the happy couple is joined by a third constituent member, to make the duo a trio in what we will coin as bio-crypt-economics. Although, as every psychologist knows, these threesomes often end up "like the rosary at dawn", and this one need not be an exception. The fact is that behind this third "Bio" there are serious and multiple threats, which cast a very long and certainly disturbing shadow.

From the crypto-bubble to the Nevada desert, crypto-economy came to settle in our lives and no longer to go

From these lines we have written at length about crypto-economics, sometimes on highly technical subjects, other times on purely economic issues, in a field particularly conducive to the inevitable fusion between technology, economy, and society. Crypto has everything in that futuristic threesome, and we say this knowingly and have warned them as we did before that crypto-bubble that ended up proving to be true, ending up blowing up in the face of investors as every bubble always does. Similarly, even after that unfortunate crypto-bubble, we have made a show of crypto-optimism (without falling into being crypto-disappointed), and we have affirmed without any doubt that the crypto-economy was here to stay and that it still has a great future ahead of it.

A good example of this future that we have analyzed in the past is the city that they are building in the middle of the Nevada desert and whose socio-economic activity will be entirely and natively called Bitcoins). And the best proof we could have that the monetary future is written in ones and zeros is that countries like Sweden have already announced their own national cryptocurrency, ahead of the ECB itself. This finally closes the huge gap that we have denounced so much, because inconceivably there was still no regulation of crypto-currency by the main Central Banks of the world, despite the fact that the crypto-market was red-hot at the time. Finally, another proof that the crypto-economy is still very much alive is how recently the traditional players of means of payment have brought out a new and revolutionary card, which among other innovations will allow you to pay with a card to be used directly from your crypto-savings, but already in all the shops that accept a simple Visa.

Entering into crypto-savings issues, equally noteworthy is the disruptive (at the time) analysis we brought you, when (almost) nobody talked about it, about Bitcoin and its wasteful model based on unnecessary energy consumption, in what was a Proof-of-Work (PoW) model that we always held to be a design flaw, although it's admittedly a somewhat understandable point when what Satoshi Nakamoto-san did was literally inventing the future. And in fact, our transgressive analysis proved to be true when the Bitcoin community got down to work trying to find alternative working test models or other models, something that had also been going on for some time in Ethereum and other altcoins. With this, they wanted to finally prevent Bitcoin from being an (unnecessary) energy-wasting machine, something that is especially serious in the era of climate change and that fight for the environment that human beings are shamefully (somewhat) losing.

The energy issue has always been Bitcoin's weak point, and a possible solution may lie in our cathode self

But energy and Bitcoin have been a complicated duet to digest for our energy-economic system, having even been banned in some places for this reason, and the most complicated part of the issue comes especially for a crypto-currency like Bitcoin that aspired (and still aspires) to become a currency of mass adoption. If this had happened in the past before it corrected its energy waste, it would have been an environmental disaster of incalculable proportions. Perhaps it was actually fortunate that Bitcoin did not go to the wall as a mass payment at first before the ecosystem was truly prepared, and thus the community had the essential option of improving its design to make it better and, among other improvements, more sustainable as well. Fortunately, since Bitcoin is a software, there are already options on the table that have been achieved in not too long, and Bitcoin and the altcoins are today much better prepared energetically to face that future that belongs to them, and in which they will be able to become massive money in circulation without unbearable impacts (at least that we know of today).

But speaking of energy, there is one extreme that has remained largely unexplored until now. The news to me personally came some time ago through one of those great friends that a server is lucky enough to have in his personal circles, and who share with us a healthy curiosity, mixed with a positive technological-economic concern, as well as a cautious ambition to prepare for that future that is always coming. And that news is disruptive to say the least because there are already great technologies patenting formulas and techniques so that our own bodies can "mine" cryptocurrencies. That's nothing.

Specifically, it has been the giant Microsoft that has caused a sensation with its new patents for what we can call "bio-crypt economy". The patented system in question is based on a new crypto-system based on human biological activity, among which brain waves and body heat, as well as other biological signals and emissions, are monitored and exploited crypto-economically. These signals and emissions would (in principle) be exploited when the subject makes use of online (or offline) services or applications, such as online search, when reading banners and ads, or when interacting with chatbots. It is at that moment when the system implanted in his body would help him to unconsciously solve the challenges of computational difficulty on which all mining is based, and which almost always go through highly complex cryptographic algorithms when it comes to being solved.

The point is that the biological activity of the user would be used as that Test Job we mentioned before, and in one way or another, it is key to "mining" cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. In addition, the patent is worldwide, having been applied for and granted by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Among the devices for measuring and monitoring the body activity of this system, the patent includes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) obtained by scanners and sensors, including electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, infrared spectroscopic sensors (NIRS), as well as pulsometers, thermal sensors, optical sensors, radio frequency (RF) sensors, ultrasonic sensors, cameras, or in general any other sensor or scanner that allows in one way or another to measure and monitor any type of biological activity. We said that this system would come into operation when the user uses some online service, which can be enjoyed free of charge (in whole or in part) in exchange for momentarily ceding their capacity to generate crypto-currency to the service in question and through the system now patented by Microsoft.

As you can see, the possibilities opened up by this new system are abysmal, as are its potential threats. And it is not only that there may be third parties that unconsciously take over the cryptographic-logical potential of our physical body to use it for who knows what, instead of its recipient is what we have decided and for which, one way or another, but we will also have to pay despite having suffered a fraudulent interposition. Besides, the fact that we all end up having such a system implanted multiplies infinitely the invasive possibilities of technology on our body, on our mind, and on our virtual and physical life: don't forget that we will most probably end up having one of these systems implanted and that it will be potentially capable of measuring our brain waves, and therefore in the (still distant) future even our own thoughts.

With all this, this system must be framed in what would be a disturbing step between the most disturbing dystopia, and the most disruptive innovation. Our bodies will be able to be conceived and exploited as money-generating machines based ultimately on our metabolism and our cellular combustion, which is the true origin of all that human biological activity to be exploited. This extreme seems to you to be totally unexpected and impossible to anticipate, but the truth is that certain analysts like the one who subscribes have already written about it in the past (even if it was with a certain dose of economy-fiction), in addition to the enormous amounts of energy that another technology such as Artificial Intelligence requires to train their synthetic minds. And at that time we already exposed the human metabolism as a solution infinitely more efficient than the energy mix of our electrical systems when used as a mere system of energy production.

But the problem is no longer so much the "how" but rather the "for whom"... the eternal question that envelops every socio-economic system

And here we come across once again in today's analysis the eternal stone (or rather "rock") of any socio-economic system that may have human socio-economic agents in its midst. The great problem of humanity in a salmon key is the (dis)nature of some, who do not hesitate to make ambition and greed their main reason for being and for conceiving their particular personal success, and which they often end up channeling into some sinister way of ending up extracting the monetary resources and the value generated by others. In fact, the same crypto-bubble I mentioned before, has been another one of those blushing cases of the unethical uprising and (almost) misappropriation of value by unscrupulous opportunistic third parties, since this bubble is now known to have been manipulated and directed by a single strong hand of the crypto-system, and whose identity is yet to be known to its own shame: anonymity is what it has, which sometimes catalyzes people to act even worse in the markets than when there is transparency, light, and stenographers.

This is no more and no less than the most reprehensible and recurrent part of Economic History, through which, from the "stupid", some try to live at the expense of others, and which has its equally reprehensible and more systemic side in this golden rule by which I always tell you that it is a maxim that every superpower always aspires to dominate the world and to live at the expense of third countries. Work is hard, and some execrably try to wade through their personal effort with the "witty" shortcut of getting others to work for them, and they simply devote themselves to extractive policies that will milk any system that humanity ends up implementing in their favor. It is a problem as eternal as it is natural for human beings: we will never be free of it, except in the case that... there are synthetic beings that neither feel nor suffer when others exploit them for their own benefit, and of which that innovative proposal is part that we were the first to bring to them as a first from these lines of having robots pay social contributions, and which would also be a future solution to the unresolved issue of the unsustainability of pensions.

But today it seems that the reality that is revealed to us by chapters runs along other parallel paths (which are not incompatible), and that is that it would be humans who with their metabolism would generate onerous economic benefits for third parties. Why limit yourself to exploiting only robots socio-economically, when for the same ambition the dark side of hacktivism and socio-economics can also exploit humans! And as another demonstration that in this enigmatic world in which we live there are many fictional dystopias that surprisingly end up becoming reality before our astonished eyes, I must remind you that the futuristic film of The Matrix had a script that already told how a super-computer system controlled what seemed like a real world, but in reality was only the product of an immeasurable digital simulation. In the past, we have also fantasized about how such a system would be priceless as a macro-system of socio-economic simulation. But the key is that this system used the bodies of those humans who lived in the simulation to physically generate energy with their highly energy-efficient biological metabolisms, something very much in line with the possibilities opened up by this Microsoft patent (however much time remains for this technology to become technically "implementable"). But the fact is that this dizzying world of ours is experiencing such an exponential technological progression that the distant future often becomes tomorrow morning!

And besides, with workable crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, it is really analogous for humans to generate either power or crypto-currency tokens. So say hello to Neo and Trinity, and above all beware of Agent Smith, who is sure to chase you down in his grim digital form of ones and zeros to snatch all the crypto-money from you. Here it is no longer a question of choosing between the red pill or the blue pill: the risk may end up being that you are not offered any pills and that what your body is capable of generating is also taken away. Never before has the human being been more of a money-making machine, since now it promises to be so twice over: with the fruit of the sweat of his brow, and with the fruit of his metabolism, everything well synthesized into valuable ones and zeros in the form of tokens. And as always some are already rubbing their hands together looking at us with greed to see how best to exploit us. Human or machine, or perhaps hybrid beings halfway between person and robot, in any case, the truth is that we run the real risk that the only difference ends up being consciousness, and at that point, perhaps that will even end up being one of our main disadvantages compared to synthetic and hybrid beings, who neither feel nor think consciously, but above all do not suffer if they are subjected to and/or their crypto-production is taken away from them. That "We are the robots" of Kraftwerk may be closer than we suspect... Any day we are singing it as a metallic canned soundtrack of our own life...