(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 thefuture of money looks like, i decided to live for a month
Time Warner Internet Bill Pay, 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 coulduse alternative currencies and try to spare cash or creditcards in anyway possible. - you're using your phoneas 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 inthe context in card volumes, i mean, that's a prettysmall drop in the bucket. hey there, do you guys accept applepay or any of the card readerthings for your phone? i can't buy anything here, right? okay. alright. thank you very much.
- when you're only usingyour phone to pay for things and find that you're sortof pushed to two extremes: really big chain stores, or really small, niche, kindof overpriced coffee shops and places like that. a couple weeks into my experiment, i ended up going to sweden. sweden happens to be way farahead of the united states when it comes to getting rid of cash.
i ended up meeting with some people who are really active inthe 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 icould put it in my hand, maybe i'd be able to payfor 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 ofusing a microchip implant in one's hand to beable to make a payment, i do question the mainstreamapplication of it, but i really think theremight be other ways where that might come near fruition, not necessarily throughlike the surgical implant, but through other kind ofintegrations 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 tobecome the first person to ever pay for a meal at arestaurant with their hand. (upbeat piano music) eventually i stumbledacross a venmo engineer, who said that he couldhelp 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 myhand 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 accomplishedwhat we set out to do and i kind of couldn't believe that it was ever going to happen. i thought i got this thingjammed in my hand for nothing. my hand is paying for everything today. if the wallet is hereand your phone is sort of a healthy middle ground, something like the chip felt to me like the furthest possibleextreme of futuristic technology.
- the challenge withmobile payments is that, especially in the u.s., it's so easy to use cards. - after doing thisexperiment, i would bet that in about ten years, it's kind of abnormal to carry around a wallet that'sjust stuffed full of cash. - that's insane. paying with the hands. what's next?
paying with the foot? (laughing) (robotic music)
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