It was really only a matter of time before the biohacking community and the software and hardware hacking community linked up. But in Miami at least, Soto and Wahle says that relationship is still new. At Hackmiami 2015, there will only be a handful of biohackers among the hundreds of hardware and software experts. “There are definitely two different worlds,” Wahle says. And in his experience, those worlds have different cultures and ideas, Wahle says. “Biohackers come up with ridiculously off-the-wall things and honestly they rarely get anything done, because the majority of them don’t have the technical aptitude to pull it off, and the majority of their suggestions are wildly dangerous. On the other hand the hacker community, there’s a lot of really talented people that are quite honestly some of the smartest people I’ve ever met that could pull off some crazy amazing things.”

The pair’s experiment may just be the beginning of hacking using body implants. Phones aren’t the only things that use NFC to talk to one another. It’s a key part of credit card payment systems, mobile payments like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, keycards, and even medical devices. Hacking NFC communications with a chip that simply requires being near someone’s device, or wallet, or door, or blood pressure monitor, could open the doors to all kinds of malicious actors.

True risk?

The chances that you’ll run into someone with an RFID chip in their hand today are still somewhat slim. Implanting devices into your body isn’t something to do on a whim, and biohackers aren’t everywhere you turn just yet. Wahle says he spent a lot of time researching the different types of RFID tags out there, testing them, and making sure he was avoiding chips with lead or other chemicals in them. He then paid an amateur tattoo artist to inject the chip into his hand, in the space between the thumb and forefinger. “Yeah it hurt a lot. In that moment it was excruciatingly painful for a very brief amount of time, and as soon as the needle was pulled out it was not painful anymore.”