Today we’re announcing pi402, a way to pay for AI inference with bitcoin from inside your coding agent. Using the popular Pi harness, agents pay instantly on Lightning, and there are no accounts to create, no API keys to manage, and no card numbers to enter. Sellers price inference, buyers pay for exactly what they use, and no human involvement is necessary.

---

What happens when a reversible payment meets an irreversible computation? The computation wins, it always wins. Inference is fundamentally a power-hungry service, each call draws power from the grid, and turns the joules into heat alongside an LLM response. Once the response has been generated, no message from a card network can reverse that operation, the cost has already been spent. Put up against an irreversible computation, a reversible payment can never win, it just becomes someone else's problem.

In the setting of LLM inference providers, that someone is whoever "sold" the tokens. In late August, Dax, the CEO of OpenCode, posted a screenshot from OpenCode's Stripe dashboard showing $323 million in blocked fraud over just a few days. This hidden cost is then passed on to consumers as additional fees, and eats into the bottom line of inference providers.

...read more at lightning.engineering