I’m writing a book and need this sourced. I have a quote from The Hill, but not sure where they came up with their number 50,000. Human microchip implants take center stage | The Hill
I guarantee this was pulled out of thin air. The article is interesting and covers a ton of stuff but doesn’t actually mention any quotes from me. That’s not an ego thing, that’s simply an observation that the article’s author somehow omitted talking to the world’s largest retailer of chip implants for humans. They mentioned bioteq and biohax and the infamous yet hillariously inaccurate “sweden conjecture”;
This technology is especially popular in Sweden as a substitute for paying with cash. “Only 1 in 4 people living in Sweden use cash at least once a week,” writes NPR. More than 4,000 Swedes have replaced keycards for chip implants to use for gym access, e-tickets on railway travel, and to store emergency contact information.
This is just incorrect metrics for Swedish implantee counts, and it falsely implies that Swedish people are paying for things with chip implants (a claim explicitly made elsewhere).
In short, it appears this author did no primary research themselves, and just picked tidbits from other media publications which included false information themselves. If I had to guess, Biohax probably made mention of that 50,000 number at some point somewhere… or possibly I made that comment years and years ago, and it was recycled so many times that by the time this author saw it, it was woefully outdated.
Media recycling happens in two ways; first the media “journalists” will take a current story and just cannibalize other stories, which is just plagiarism with extra steps. The second type of media recycling that happens is that an old story will be re-published basically word for word, because the original story was so compelling that it can be republished year upon year and still get spikes of eyeballs.
The Swedish article depicting the idea of “thousands of Swedish people are paying with microchip implants” (a completely false premise) has continued to be republished over and over again for at least 5 years now… though I can’t really remember when the original article first came out.
My point is, if you are pulling from media for sources, forget it. Journalism in 2005 when I had my first chip implant “discovered” by world media was pretty full of misinformation, but now it’s just regurgitated nonsense so thick with bile and ignorance you might as well just ask ChatGPT to make something up for you.
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I tried ChatGPT and it definitely didn’t like the source. I’m not able to find anything sourceable for even an estimated count of users. Do you have any suggestions? I appreciate your time.
I can only offer a guess based on our private sales figures and approximating how much other companies in the space have likely sold. That number for 2023 is sitting at around 250,000 people world wide, with a distribution of about 49% in North America, 48% in the EU (primarily countries with a strong English speaking population), and 2% in Australia.
Virtually no sales have taken place in Asia or Russia as far as I’m aware. Culture differences and language barriers are the primary reasons for this.
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I appreciate this valuable information. In order to properly attribute it in my book, could you please advise on the preferred format for the credit?
Amal, I’m finalizing section of my book for my editor with the information you have provided. Can you tell me what your title/position is with Dangerous Things? Thank you so much!
I’m the CEO though it’s an LLC which doesn’t have executive board the same way.
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Thank you!
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Found a couple of other estimates but they are dated.
There’s a short but interesting paper from the Journal of Hand Surgery (Global Online). They seem to be a legit, peer-reviewed medial journal, but I didn’t dig too deeply.
Biohacking and Chip Implantation in the Human
Hand: An Introduction (March, 2024)
The paper estimates 50,000 to 100,000 people have had an RFID chip implanted. They cite The Hill article as well as a 2018 article from Ars Technicia
A practical guide to microchip implants - Ars Technicia - January 2018
That article also gives a 50,000 to 100,000 estimate based on … 
an interview with Amal
For AI-assisted research, check out Perplexity. It combines many of the LLM capabilities of GPTs but with a requirement that text is anchored to linkable sources. It can still make mistakes, but it usually fails on the side of being too cautious (saying “I don’t know” when there are sources it could have looked at).
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Thank you so much for this info. I appreciate it!
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