The Ultimate in Mobile Payments: A Chip Under the Skin

Mobile payments have advanced a long way over the years.

From cash to checks to credit cards and now to mobile devices, the ability to pay on the go has long been prized.

Now, a new development known as “bio-payments” is coming into play, and it’s a development that will have some excited and others outright terrified.

Bio-payments, as it’s called by developer Patric Lanhed, started when he put a small computer chip under his skin that held the key to his Bitcoin wallet. With that in place, he could essentially scan his hand and make purchases anywhere Bitcoin was accepted.

The bio-payment system isn’t much different, inherently, from most any other breed of mobile payment with the key difference that bio-payments are connected directly to the skin. It’s fairly easy to lose a phone—just ask anyone to whom it’s happened—but losing a hand or a chunk of skin?

That’s a traumatic affair that, should it happen, most would remember exactly where and under what circumstances years after the fact.

Lanhed and his team hope to tie the chip in question to more payment methods soon, including credit cards and other platforms. Though Lanhed and cohort Juanjo Tara are the first to claim that they’ve made payments via the hand interface, this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

Last year, Dutch Bitcoin ATM firm founder Martijn Wismeijer claimed to have put near field communications (NFC) chips into his hands already, though no word emerged over whether he’d made payments from said chips. Reports even suggest that the code the chips run on may ultimately be open source so as to allow for wider development.

On the one hand, this is a terrific advancement forward; users would essentially never be without a wallet again, no matter where said users went, and that’s a development worthy of the ages. By like token, there will be plenty of people out there who are terrified of the notion, believing it represents a whole new level of intrusiveness by allowing an access point directly inside the human body.

Additionally, many believe that such a measure might ultimately be the thing that brings about the end of the world and eternal damnation; the idea of a chip in the hand that’s used to buy and sell sounds a lot like the Mark of the Beast, as it’s called, and that’s a development that will have many running away from it as fast as possible.

There’s one critical component missing, however, as no one is required to have this particular chip in order to buy or sell things.

As long as it remains an option, it will likely be cautiously accepted, or even enthusiastically so. The lure of convenience will be too much for many to pass up, and the bio-payment system will mean never forgetting a wallet again. For others, it will be a step too far, and avoided on general principles. Either way, it’s quite an unlikely step forward, and one that will likely engender controversy for some time to come.