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Man gets NFC chip implants in hands to store Bitcoin wallet
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Bitcoin, it’s currently the biggest cryptocurrency in the world. For safety reasons, users of the currency normally keep the majority of their bitcoins offline, like on an encrypted USB stick or even physically on a piece of paper. In this day and age, keeping as much information as possible offline can (in theory) lessen the chances of it being hacked.
So what’s safer than than encrypted hardware, or even a piece of paper? Why inside your own body of course, which is exactly where one Bitcoin user has injected and stored his currency.
Martijn Wismeijer, a Dutch entrepreneur (and apparently a very avid fan of Bitcoin) has walked around with an NFC chip injected in both of his hands for the past 10 days. The chips don’t serve the same purpose, however, as one contains data that can be often changed and overwritten, while the other contains his encrypted Bitcoin wallet data.
Having a chip in his hands allows him to do things like give out his contact details by simply having his hand scanned, or make payments with the hand containing the encrypted wallet.
Convenient? I would have to say yes.
Martijn’s doctor wasn’t crazy about him having the “NFC Type 2 compliant NTAG216 RFID chipset” implanted into his body, which is stored in a small 2 x 12 millimeter capsule. Each chip can store around 880 bytes of information, and the chips themselves (along with a preloaded syringe) were purchased for $99 from a site called DangerousThings.com.
Interestingly enough, the founder of DangeriousThings.com (Amal Graafstra) has taken it a step further, and has used chips in his hands to unlock the doors of his house for almost the past 10 years (in combination with Samsung Ezon door locks). He says that after a while you don’t even notice the chips, and acknowledges that the injections do hurt a bit more than your standard flu shot.
Would you ever consider using injections like these? Let me know what you think in the comments below!