A bitcoiner under the name F148 has taken a very radical step to be able to pay with bitcoin (BTC). He has implanted a chip in his hand with which he can make payments via the Lightning Network (LN). All he has to do is hold his hand in front of a payment device.
Pay with bitcoin
This is an IT professional from Switzerland. He spoke recently with Cointelegraph about the choice to perform the medical procedure. In his own words, he implanted the chip because he especially liked it. He also advises no one to also have a Lightning Network chip installed in his or her body.
“The use case is just to show that it’s possible and you can do things like that. It’s funny when you do a presentation because sometimes I do presentations about payments and talk to people who work at banks and are quite surprised when they see my hand.”
It took F148 two tries to get his implant working. Something went wrong on the first attempt, so the chip did not do its job. He therefore paid a medical specialist to remove the faulty chip and then try again. This time it worked.
Bitcoin Lightning Network
The chip is in his left hand and with the chip F148 can make payments without having to carry a card or the like. After all, he always has his left hand with him. He can make payments with the chip via the Lightning Network, a layer-2 scaling solution built on top of the Bitcoin network.
It Bitcoin Lightning Network must ensure that payments via the Bitcoin network become many times easier and cheaper. After all, the base layer of the network is very slow, capable of only handling a handful of transactions per minute. With the Lightning Network, making payments is a lot smoother.