Sure, but a) this doesn't require blockchain, and b) there's no incentive for the various players to make credits portable.

I'm tired of the "this doesn't require blockchain" argument. The alternative is a centralized entity that controls payments. Is that REALLY your preferred solution?

Yes. Nothing about this needs to be modeled for adversarial agents.

The alternative is continually watching over my shoulder for some sort of scam because I have no recourse.

And agents just make it easier.

It's the AI companies' preferred solution. You're free to host your own agent that takes crypto, but the other agents you expect your agent to interact with will want you to buy non-transferable credits up front. Why would they join in on a decentralized system that doesn't benefit them?

I am not following where (in your initial message) you stated that “centralized entity that controls the payments is not good”

Yes, I’d rather start a bank chartered with my own rules that leverages regulation, and only use the existence of crypto as an odorous alternative when negotiating service fees with Visa.

Are you talking about a stablecoin crypto? Because why would I buy tokens on a chain where the value of the tokens can change wildly from day to day? How do the services that accept those tokens value them and charge appropriately?

So you're saying cryptocurrency remains a solution in search of a problem?

clearly, that is not what I said. What I said is there is a very big problem (closed ecosystem of incompatible credit systems) that can be solved using this technology that does payments really well.

Can I go to any grocery shop, check out, and pay by sticking my watch to a terminal for one second? Can I go to any website, have my browser fill in the credit card details, and click "pay"? Can I submit a dispute if I get charged incorrectly?

Because that's my bar for "does payments really well".

Sure, I can't spend my Amazon gift cards for my Warframe platinum. Yeah, Amazon could strike a deal with Digital Extremes. And maybe I could even use that platinum on Fortnite skins. But their respective deals will happen in dollars, not dogecoins.

You can do this using OpenRouter; they accept USDC I think

I want a protocol, not a company that will act as a proxy.

that's neat

IMO the website is terrible. Instead of putting what actually is transmitted up and front it just tells you to use their wrapper libs as middleware with 0 reference to the wire protocol.

What HTTP headers are used? What's the body of the HTTP 402 response? The docs don't say any of that, they just say `npm install x402`.

Yeah lets combine two technologies that need lots of energy. Climate change is still a problem

A tired old debate devoid of facts. The chains I advocated for are proof of stake, and AI is a useful system worth the energy it uses. Should we not consume energy at all?

You've stated you're tired in several threads. Maybe you should take a break from the internet for a few minutes?

I highly doubt that the majority things AI is used for is useful.

I see lots of spam videos, pictures and texts that flood insta, Youtube etc. to monetize on ad revenue or simply scam people.

I think cryptocurrency aren’t any better if you compare legit uses vs criminal ones.

> Should we not consume energy at all?

No need for a strawman. Prevention of wasteful use doesn’t mean no use at all.

> A tired old debate devoid of facts.

You are advocating for more fucking cryptocurrency.

You don't get to ignore any response as "a tired old debate devoid of facts".

He wasn't ignoring anything, he was pointing out that that criticism is based on outdated information. Almost all modern blockchain designs (from the past ~10 years) do not promote energy waste via PoW.

It's fine to point out the energy waste of more traditional PoW chains (particularly Bitcoin, which accounts for the bulk of PoW), but to frame that as a problem with blockchains in general is misguided.

A problem of cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are useful and need less power.

Bitcoin is still the biggest player in the cryptocurrency world, so still a lot of wasted energy.

PoS is sort of hard to bootstrap. ETH moved to it which was quite an achievement, but it’s difficult to see how it might have started that way.

If Bitcoin fails then it seems to me the bottom will fall out of all of crypto So all of it still depends on PoW propping up BTC.

I wouldn't say there any major technical hurdles to bootstrapping PoS, the project just has to decide where the initial tokens should go - insiders, ICO, airdrops, etc. Many modern chains have been PoS from the start, like Cardano, Solana, Algorand, Avalanche, NEAR, etc.

Or do you mean in the sense that (some argue) the most fair way to do an initial token distribution is PoW with no premine?

Apparently one of the old school decentralized RPC providers (pocket network) has pivoted into being a way to access open data sources in a permissionless way. I think this is what you’re talking about?

https://pocket.network/case-study-building-a-decentralized-d...

I don’t disagree that it would be nice to be able to do this, but barring some black swan-esque event that changes how people see these things, it’ll probably always be somewhat niche compared to more permissioned or centralized systems. That or the decentralized systems will need to be VERY competitively priced to make the value-prop a bit more of a slam dunk for making this more widespread outside of philosophically-aligned hardliners and idealists

> Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app.

Sounds like things are working just fine without the extra cryptocurrency step.