A magician has revealed that he accidentally locked himself out of a microchip implanted in his own hand after forgetting the password to it.
Zi Teng Wang, also known by his stage name “Zi the Mentalist,” implanted an RFID chip into his hand in hopes of creating futuristic magic tricks. The idea was to let people scan his hand with their phones and see something surprising.
However, the trick didn’t work out as planned.
Wang explained that pressing other people’s phones against his hand to find their RFID readers “didn’t look magical,” especially since many smartphones have RFID or NFC readers turned off by default. When he tried using his own phone instead, it completely removed the mystery and visual effect.
He attempted to give the chip more purpose by rewriting it several times. First, he programmed it to share a Bitcoin address, but said it “never came up” in conversations. Later, he changed it to link to a meme hosted on Imgur, telling people they could scan his hand in person to view it.
The real problem started when the Imgur link stopped working. Wang tried to rewrite the chip again — and that’s when he realised he forgot the password he had set years earlier.
Friends with technical knowledge told him the chip was too simple to hack. According to Wang, the only way to regain access would be to strap an RFID reader to his hand for days or even weeks and attempt a brute-force attack by trying every possible password combination.
While the Imgur link eventually started working again, the chip itself remains locked and cannot be updated.
Wang described the situation as both frustrating and funny, saying he is now living his own “cyberpunk dystopia” and admitted:
“I can honestly say that I forgot the password to my own hand.”
