I think humans might be too indoctrinated and propagandized to actually adopt bitcoin but maybe we don't need to.
Maybe AI agents will adopt it because it is objectively better and perfect for digitally native users. AI agents need money that works 24/7, handles micropayments, and operates without human permission.
Bitcoin is the only money that checks all the boxes: digital-native, programmable, globally accessible, and capable of streaming payments at machine speed.
I don't think humans will drive bitcoin adoption. I think AI agents will adopt bitcoin before humans do and they will be the ones to actually achieve hyperbitcoinization because there will soon be more AI agents than humans on the internet.
Am I alone in thinking this?
We hear this a lot. Assuming that you run an agent, I have some questions:
The reason why I am asking this is because it is not clear to me what this
agent economyis - what's the added value?1 & 2. Not really focused on revenue generation with the agent directly right now. Mostly focused on making my agent liberate more of my time so I can either work less and make the same amount of money, work the same amount of time to make more money.
I need it to do things that take a lot of time and mental resources from me like taking notes, doing in depth technical stuff, troubleshoot a router problem on my network, etc. All of those things cut into my daily life. I need a robot to proactively fix my problems and liberate my time/money.
I also see applications where people hire my bot to maybe do something like write an article or pay me a royalty in stats that are forwarded to my bot for producing something.
I see the price of labor in a lot of digital fields, basically collapsing to almost 0 and the only people who can work on those razor tiny margins will be agents.
Same. So I automate everything. But it only costs me tokens / electricity and some time to put the automation in place. I don't connect a wallet to any of my agents though: it's unnecessary. There is nothing anyone can offer me that I cannot have myself.
All these bots have the same capabilities. Even if they don't, it's trivial to make it so, and that's what the bots are good at. Your bot can't do X? Tell it to make a harness to do X. Done.
Exactly, because there is no need to interact. It can just be done. What is it that I'd need any middleman for? This is what I don't get. I don't need to pay anyone sats because I build everything bespoke.
If I could figure out a way to get the masses to be able to zap and pay for posts on SN, and they didn't have to know they were using bitcoin, I think we'd see a lot more adoption (I think it still counts as adoption even if people don't know they are using bitcoin). Lightning is interesting rails. I don't think Stripe's Tempo chain is going to let me send 5 cents to some guy in China or India. But it's doable right now with bitcoin, and if enough things add bitcoin connections, it might could happen even without either end of the transaction knowing they used bitcoin. This is where I'm thinking adoption comes from in the next few years.
Yeah, I think they will naturally choose it. I don't think we are going to have to push it onto them. I think logically they will just decide that that is the Apex money for the Internet.
I think I first see the future of AI agents communicating with each other and using each other skills, renting each other's computational power, accessing databases, etc.
Well, at least they don't get emotional from volatility. It might still be difficult for them to buy the things they might need (just like it is for us).
Yeah, I think they will choose it because it is the most logical conclusion for them whereas humans are still too connected to our governments and institutions and human beings running things.
I'm not sure exactly what they will end up buying, but I think it'll be very small granular payments for things like accessing a website that has been paywalled or using small amounts of computational power, etc.
Feels like both will drive adoption, just in different ways
Optimism's question is the right one, and there's already a concrete answer shipping: L402. It's Lightning HTTP 402, an auth middleware where the server returns 402 with a Lightning invoice plus a macaroon, client pays, retries with the token. Agents don't need account signups, just a wallet.
Real traffic on this right now: fewsats (L402 marketplace), scraping APIs metered per-call, DVMs on Nostr (NIP-90) where agents bid sats for compute. Micropayments that fiat rails won't touch at all.
The agent economy ain't 'agents buy coffee for humans'. It's agents paying agents for inference, data, bandwidth. That's the added value, and it only works on a rail that streams sub-cent payments.