[rachofsunshine]

Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its cryptographic security).

That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new web. Something like:

* User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL.

* Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our computational resources please".

* User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the tokens attached.

* Server responds.

People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe we're approaching the point where there is one.

[orangebread]

Yeah, this is something I've thought of and in my search for something like what you're describing I came across https://world.org/

The problem is Sam Altman saw this coming a long time ago and is an investor (co-owner?) of this project.

I believe we will see a world where things are a lot more agentic and where applicable, a human will need to be verified for certain operations.

[jazzyjackson]

You don't need Sama's Orb or a cryptocurrency, you can just have a government issued PKI. Estonia has been doing this for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Cloudflare deployed the "hand out tokens to anonymously pass captchas" to throw Tor users a bone.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/