Comment by spaceman_2020

11 days ago

This is legitimately the place where crypto makes sense to me. Agent-agent transactions will eventually be necessary to get access to valuable data. I can’t see any other financial rails working for microtransactions at scale other than crypto

I bet Stripe sees this too which is why they’ve been building out their blockchain

25 comments

spaceman_2020

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zinodaur  11 days ago

> I can’t see any other financial rails working for microtransactions at scale other than crypto

Why does crypto help with microtransactions?

  • spaceman_2020  11 days ago

    Fees are negligible if you move to a L2 (even on L1s like Solana). Crypto is also permissionless and spending can be easily controled via smart contracts

    • zinodaur  11 days ago

      Permissionless doesn't mean much if it's not anonymous (central authority wants to stop you from doing x; sees you doing x with non-anonymous coin, punishes you).

      I understand the appeal of anonymous currencies like Monero (hence why they are banned from exchanges), but beyond that I don't see much use for crypto

      4 replies →

  • mcintyre1994  11 days ago

    Is there any non-crypto option cheaper than Stripe’s 30c+? They charge even more for international too.

    • simgt  11 days ago

      Once the price of a transaction converges to the cost of the infrastructure processing it, I don't see a technical reason for crypto to be cheaper. It's likely cheaper now because speculation, not work, is the source of revenue.

      3 replies →

  • ozim  11 days ago

    Also why does crypto is more scalable. Single transaction takes 10 to 60 minutes already depending on how much load there is.

    Imagine dumping loads of agents making transactions that’s going to be much slower than getting normal database ledgers.

parafee  11 days ago

Agreed. We've been thinking about this exact problem.

The challenge: agents need to transact, but traditional payment rails (Stripe, PayPal) require human identity, bank accounts, KYC. That doesn't work for autonomous agents.

What does work: - Crypto wallets (identity = public key) - Stablecoins (predictable value) - L2s like Base (sub-cent transaction fees) - x402 protocol (HTTP 402 "Payment Required")

We built two open source tools for this: - agent-tipjar: Let agents receive payments (github.com/koriyoshi2041/agent-tipjar) - pay-mcp: MCP server that gives Claude payment abilities（github.com/koriyoshi2041/pay-mcp)

Early days, but the infrastructure is coming together.

  • nojs  11 days ago

    I am genuinely curious - what do you see as the difference between "agent-friendly payments" and simply removing KYC/fraud checks?

    Like basically what an agent needs is access to PayPal or Stripe without all the pesky anti-bot and KYC stuff. But this is there explicitly because the company has decided it's in their interests to not allow bots.

    The agentic email services are similar. Isn't it just GSuite, or SES, or ... but without the anti-spam checks? Which is fine, but presumably the reason every provider converges on aggressive KYC and anti-bot measures is because there are very strong commercial and compliance incentives to do this.

    If "X for agents" becomes a real industry, then the existing "X for humans" can just rip out the KYC, unlock their APIs, and suddenly the "X for agents" have no advantage.