(upbeat music) (cash register ringing)
Hi, my name is Charlie Warzel.
I'm a Senior Writer with BuzzFeed News.
And in order to see what the future of money looks like,
I decided to live for a month
by just paying for things with my phone.
And somewhere along the line,
I ended up getting a microchip implanted
inside my hand to see if I could be
the first person in the world
to pay for something out in the real world
using just their hand.
I basically wanted to try to download
as many apps on my phone as possible
and make sure that I could use alternative currencies
and try to spare cash or credit cards in anyway possible.
- You're using your phone as a payment method.
We call that a Proximity Mobile Payment.
And we estimate that by the end of 2016,
U.S. adults will spend 27 billion dollars
using their phone at the point of sale.
But, you look at that in the context in card volumes,
I mean, that's a pretty small drop in the bucket.
Hey there, do you guys accept ApplePay
or any of the card reader things for your phone?
I can't buy anything here, right?
Okay. Alright. Thank you very much.
- When you're only using your phone to pay for things
and find that you're sort of pushed to two extremes:
really big chain stores,
or really small, niche, kind of overpriced coffee shops
and places like that.
A couple weeks into my experiment,
I ended up going to Sweden.
Sweden happens to be way far ahead of the United States
when it comes to getting rid of cash.
I ended up meeting with some people
who are really active in the biohacking community
and found that you could actually implant
an RFID NFC chip in your hand.
- [Voiceover] Take a deep breath for me.
(deep breath)
And exhale.
- And so I figured, if I could put it in my hand,
maybe I'd be able to pay for something with my hand.
- [Voiceover] That was it.
Really. - [Charlie] Yeah.
- [Voiceover] Keep breathing.
- [Voiceover] How does it feel?
- It's like pinchy.
It definitely hurt like way more
than they said it was going to. (laughs)
It looks sort of like a grain of rice
or like a pill that's in my hand.
- I think the idea of using a microchip implant
in one's hand to be able to make a payment,
I do question the mainstream application of it,
but I really think there might be other ways
where that might come near fruition,
not necessarily through like the surgical implant,
but through other kind of integrations with the body.
- So once everything healed,
I decided that I needed to start focusing
on how to make this chip work
and I really wanted to become the first person
to ever pay for a meal at a restaurant with their hand.
(upbeat piano music)
Eventually I stumbled across a Venmo engineer,
who said that he could help me with my task.
What they decided is that they would
put my Venmo unique user ID onto my chip,
which would basically make it so that
any phone would recognize my hand as a Venmo app. (laughs)
(upbeat music)
- So you're good to go.
That was just so sick, dude.
- [Voiceover] That's amazing.
- That was sick.
- [Charlie] Yes.
- [Voiceover] That was narly.
- That was insane!
- We actually accomplished what we set out to do
and I kind of couldn't believe that it was
ever going to happen.
I thought I got this thing jammed in my hand for nothing.
My hand is paying for everything today.
If the wallet is here and your phone is sort of
a healthy middle ground,
something like the chip felt to me
like the furthest possible extreme of futuristic technology.
- The challenge with mobile payments is that,
especially in the U.S.,
it's so easy to use cards.
- After doing this experiment, I would bet that
in about ten years, it's kind of abnormal
to carry around a wallet that's just stuffed full of cash.
- That's insane.
Paying with the hands.
What's next?
Paying with the foot?
(laughing)
(robotic music)