[adrianwaj]

Well, if there was a way to monetize bot traffic, wouldn't that be useful? And bots may be willing to pay, given they are training on your data. So getting on the receiving end of the trillion dollar paywall... not useless at all.

I think the idea was for stablecoins to be used to sell government bonds and treasuries. Interesting use cases for digital nomads.. assessing possible geographic locations according to the strength of their stablecoins and government integration.

So it's about micropayments and making them viable and useful. That's still the 'cold fusion' of today's internet. I personally think they should be opt-in and scalable to one's generosity/means. If people are willing/able to pay for something, they should.

Blockchain just needs to be implemented better, that's all.

"Ping the AI and then charge it when it comes" is the future, quite possibly.

[spir]

Coincidentally, there is a renaissance in micropayments happening in crypto right now. It is only a few months old and growing fast. It's called x402.

https://www.x402.org/

https://www.x402scan.com/

Related to x402 micropayments is the ERC-8004 standard for AI agent reputation.

https://8004scan.io/

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8004

[adrianwaj]

Yeah, it may well end up being used for "maxipayments" too, as coupled with biometrics, perhaps.

But what will make it ubiquitous?

Also, there's something cumbersome and risky about using today's wallet apps. Imagine you're taking a train, about to buy a book on Amazon, and the guy next to you pulls out a knife and wants you to drain your wallet into his when he sees what you're doing. Or your computer is hacked somehow? Or you get a home invasion?

I think as money-printing keeps ramping up, people will just gravitate to crypto anyway.

But in the future, I expect AIs to become more common: at one point there was only Bitcoin and no long-tail of coins. And all these new AIs will need to be trained. Will x402 make that easy for them? How will the AIs access the new and original knowledge?

People will just expect AI as they expect sat-nav today in their cars, and eventually will expect self-driving cars. When was the last time you went into a library to access a physical encyclopedia? Banks may eventually fall away too as clusters of relationships form across the world to provides goods and services of value and seek refuge from tariffs but also access to resources.

Globalization is fine, but maybe the tech just wasn't/isn't ready yet? Cultural groups are also becoming increasingly intertwined too - but so are AI translation abilities.