3 ms·

Meh. I got an rfid implant in 2010 ish, but took it out after a few years because there were so few benefits. If there was a universal standard maybe, or if the

by roel_v 9y ago

Meh. I got an rfid implant in 2010 ish, but took it out after a few years because there were so few benefits. If there was a universal standard maybe, or if the range was > 10 cm, or if it had more than a few bytes of memory. I think most people who got a chip implant over the last 10 years came to the same conclusion. The only applications that show up in the press every now and then are like this - for payments. But never something that is widely available. It's great to get yourself labeled a freak though. I got mine done in a a piercing shop, and when I walked in, the place was full with people with dozens of facial piercings, stretched earlobes and full arm and neck tattoos. But as soon as I mentioned the chip implant and showed that I was serious by showing the actual one I wanted put in, they all started murmuring and looking at me like I was send back in time from the year 2210. The owner wasn't sure how to feel when I pulled out a laptop and rfid reader and grinned like an idiot when I successfully logged on to the machine by waving my hand over the reader.

owenversteeg 9y ago
Got rid of it? Why not just leave it in? Also, I think you can get chips with kilobytes of memory easily. Sure, not enough to store too much data on there, but fairly reasonable for a bunch of stuff.
- roel_v 9y ago
  Well it was still a foreign thing floating around in my hand. Back then I still trained bjj/mma and I was always slightly nervous it would break or pinch a muscle or something. Since it was of no use anyway, I figured it'd be better to take it out. Re: memory, what would be a useful use case for having a few kb of data under your skin? It's not enough to store e.g. crucial documents, plus you need a custom reader. When I got it, I thought 'uses will pop up when I have one'. Turns out they didn't, and it wasn't for lack of trying. Most people have come to the same conclusion. (Amal Graafstra, one of the earliest people who did it and blogged about it, made a career out of it - but that's only realistic for the first person to do it)
lrvick 9y ago
To counter this 4 years later I still use mine every day. I have retrofitted everything in my life that once used metal keys to work with them. Also 1024 bytes is plenty to store pretty useful things like encrypted deterministic seeds for private keys for things like cryptocurrency, ssh, etc. Would do it again, and have more implants planned.

by roel_v 9y ago

owenversteeg 9y ago

Got rid of it? Why not just leave it in? Also, I think you can get chips with kilobytes of memory easily. Sure, not enough to store too much data on there, but fairly reasonable for a bunch of stuff.

roel_v 9y ago
Well it was still a foreign thing floating around in my hand. Back then I still trained bjj/mma and I was always slightly nervous it would break or pinch a muscle or something. Since it was of no use anyway, I figured it'd be better to take it out. Re: memory, what would be a useful use case for having a few kb of data under your skin? It's not enough to store e.g. crucial documents, plus you need a custom reader. When I got it, I thought 'uses will pop up when I have one'. Turns out they didn't, and it wasn't for lack of trying. Most people have come to the same conclusion. (Amal Graafstra, one of the earliest people who did it and blogged about it, made a career out of it - but that's only realistic for the first person to do it)

lrvick 9y ago

To counter this 4 years later I still use mine every day. I have retrofitted everything in my life that once used metal keys to work with them. Also 1024 bytes is plenty to store pretty useful things like encrypted deterministic seeds for private keys for things like cryptocurrency, ssh, etc. Would do it again, and have more implants planned.