Last night I had a nightmare about cloudflare finally monetizing the "making sure you're not a robot" page. AI agents got the information they needed, we got ads instead ("why are you here? You're supposed to let agents do the thing. Watch some ads instead").
I dream of the day where we have the opposite. Each website you visit/scrape/your bot interacts with asks you for $0.01 as payment in lightning tokens. You pay per visit and you don't have to see ads or be tracked anymore.
Bot could look at remaining balance and decide which sites to visit. Ah, <popular resource> has raised rates to 0.025 microtokens/access, I'll have to use <secondary resource> which is still a budget-friendly 0.005 mt.
I woke up with such a bad feeling..