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.

A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction.

But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists.

Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds.

Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem.

We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published.

I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?

I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.

My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.

I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.

Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.

These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.