I suppose this is a predictable take from Silicon Valley, and it's interesting to see how they argue for a payments world where they can position themselves to take a cut. I think he's wrong on almost every point here so let me expand:

• There's nothing Lightning and Ecash can't do that Stablecoins can: programmable, instant, micro. Stablecoins are less private, and they're not even stable--they're defined by a fiat currency that loses value. They also perpetuate a model where your online activity can be tracked and resold in a data market.
• The advertising model wasn't a sin because it enabled commerce, it was a sin because it enabled surveillance-as-a-market and behavior modification at large scale, as a foundational primitive of the Web. Its externalities are the problem.
• The idea that advertising is a "micro-transaction in the background" is laughable: you had to invent a market to price "impressions" and "views" of content. You will be shocked to hear that this market is rife with fraud, as is the adjacent online survey market. There is no way to accurately price content if you're pricing it off metadata about the users that read it. A market requires the price to be "discovered" and the way to do that is to let users pay for stuff.
• Debatable, but I've never experienced the claim that micro-transactions put too much burden on the user, and therefore subscriptions make more sense. I don't want to subscribe to your newsletter and be wed to a recurring contract to subsidize your writing, and then read it to feel like I'm getting value. For some writers I would, but not most. I would instead happily pay you micro transactions to read individual articles when I fancy.

Overall I think this is some extensive mental gymnastics to hold on to a Silicon Valley model that will soon be obsolete. GLHF.

This was a great read! Thanks for sharing @Car

My immediate reaction is that Nostr is the (open) agentic web. Or at least that's where it has the most promise in my mind