Latest / Spiral: Open Money, Open Intelligence
Open-Source AI Needs to Get Serious
AI agents are getting powerful, but they still can’t reliably pay for things because the internet’s payment stack is built to stop bots. Big players like Visa, Stripe/OpenAI, Google, and Coinbase are racing to define “agentic payments,” but the standards they push are likely to be permissioned, incomplete, or create lock-in around a small set of approved rails.
If open-source agents want to stay competitive, they need to rally around open, widely-usable payment rails and push merchants to support agent-friendly checkout. Whatever you think of bitcoin, it was made for this.
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