[utopiah]

I fail to see the use case where it's useful. I understand how it works and what it might enable but typically I want to cherry pick my API because I trust the source and their pricing (as here we are covering only paid for services).

What situations do you imagine where one :

- changes frequently and/or covers a LOT of APIs

- requires little to no budget oversight

- requires little to no quality oversight

?

[nemild]

(On the small team that helped create x402)

To start, it's great for micropayments globally. There are examples where you want an API once and not again, and you don't want to create an account or link a credit card.

Cloudflare was one of our earliest partners, and they saw a critical need for it for web scraping by AI.

[utopiah]

> great for micropayments globally

My personal Website supported WebMonetization (details https://webmonetization.org ) for more than 5 years already so no need to convince me about that, I agree. I also believe one could just as easily have a funding.md with an IBAN and structured communication to make the equivalent.

Anyway that's beside the point, what I still don't get is a use case without or without AI according to the constraints I listed before.

[arbol]

Training data for LLMs immediately springs to mind. They've had a free pass so far but there have been numerous threads on HN talking about server costs ramping up. People are creating zip bombs etc. to combat the LLM companies. Artists are not happy about content being ripped off.

If you consider that AI agents may end up autonomously designing, building and running SaaS-like products, or API microservices, it makes sense that they should be able to pay systems in stable coin. It allows them to operate without the restrictions put in place by traditional financial institutions. That's my futurist opinion.