Man has NFC chips injected into his hands to store cold Bitcoin wallet



Any serious Bitcoin user will preach the benefits of cold storage: keeping the bulk of your bitcoins offline somewhere, like on an encrypted USB stick, or even printed on a piece of paper. The idea is that by keeping that data offline, it’s far less susceptible to being hacked.

So, the theory goes: what could be safer than keeping it inside your own body?

For the last 10 days, Martijn Wismeijer, a Dutch entrepreneur and Bitcoin enthusiast, has lived with an NFC chip embedded in each hand. One has data that he’s constantly overwriting; he can put his contact details in simply by having another person scan his hand with an NFC-enabled phone. But the other contains the encrypted private key to his wallet.

"I use it for cold storage, but it's not cold because it's 37 degrees Celsius inside my body!" he told Ars over Skype on Friday.

Specifically, he has an "NFC Type 2 compliant NTAG216 RFID chipset" embedded in a tiny glass capsule (2 millimeters by 12 millimeters) that was injected into the fleshy part of his hand between his thumb and index finger. Each capsule can hold just 880 bytes of data, which is more than enough for a cold storage wallet. The Dutchman got it as part of a pre-loaded syringe sold as a $99 kit from DangerousThings.com, a Washington State-based website that sells to hobbyists and biohackers.

On Nov. 3, 2014, Wismeijer had it installed by Tom van Oudenaarden of Piercing Studio Utrecht after his own Amsterdam doctor refused.

"My doctor doesn't like it!" Wismeijer said. "He didn't want to do it, he just wants to make people better, and I’m not sick—I just want this thing inside my body. He was right, so that's why you need body manipulation artists."

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