Mentalist implanted an RFID chip in his hand to perform tricks. But you forgot your password

The American illusionist “Zi the Mentalist” implanted an RFID chip in his hand, so he could perform “magic tricks” with smartphones and experiments with Bitcoins. But everything went wrong, from bad to worse, including the fact that the magician forgot the password to access the implant — which became useless.

A magician and molecular biologist from Missouri faced the limits of modernity after accidentally locking himself out of the technology he had implanted in his own body.

Zi Teng Wangwho works under the stage name , recently recounted the experience on his Facebook, where an X-ray image shows the RFID microchip that he had implanted in his hand a few years ago, between the thumb and index finger.

The experience began as a curious mix of artistic performance with technological fascination, says .

The purpose of the chip was to serve as a prop for interactive magic tricks; in theory, when a smartphone with a compatible reader was touched to Zi’s hand, the chip activated certain “magical” effects.

RFID implants, typically made up of a tiny chip and an antenna encapsulated in biocompatible glassare powered wirelessly by external readers and can store a small amount of data.

In this case, Zi programmed the chip to trigger digital events — first at the service of his “magic” acts on stage and, later, as a platform for technical experiences.

Zi quickly realized, however, the practical limitations of using an implanted RFID device in magic tricks. The physical gesture of guiding viewers, making them move their cell phone and trying to find the exact point to activate the reader seemed unnatural.

Furthermore, many cell phones feature RFID functions disabled by defaultor have difficulty detecting and communicating with the chip through the skin. Result: the illusion lost both its charm and technical reliabilityand the chip became useless as a magic prop.

Undeterred, Zi continued to experiment. First, he reprogrammed the chip as a Bitcoin wallet, which was also useless; later, he installed the address of a meme on Imgur. But when the platform changed its URLs, the image stopped working — and the chip became useless again.

Finally, the ultimate problem: When Zi tried once again to reprogram the device, he realized that in the meantime if you forgot your password required to change the data.

Modern RFID and NFC chips often allow you to set write protections or passwords to prevent changes unauthorized — but if we forget the password, those credentials can make the device practically impossible to access or update.

Unlocking the chip would require testing, in a cycle, successive possible combinations in a “brute force” approach — a process that could take days or weeks, with an RFID reader permanently held at hand.

Unlike many consumer gadgets, implantable chips pose unique recovery challenges: Too many failed attempts can lock the device permanentlywithout any practical way to replace it.

Of course, Zi can always choose to give up its chip, uninstall it, and install a new chip. But… to do exactly what?