It would take too long for the agent to earn enough money to have a single transaction that could be used to top-up the account; you can't do many micropayments to top-up which is the issue. And on top of that, the whole point of agents is that they can perform menial, small tasks for you to focus on the big stuff, and no one will want to pay an agent $5 for something small, especially if it's not their own agent.
Eventually it will also primarily be agents communicating with agents, and that definitely can't be done with account-based funds at scale with humans expecting the agents to run along on their own doing their thing. It's not that agents need Bitcoin, it's that they need micropayments, it just so happens that Bitcoin makes micropayments easier.
Replies (2)
ok, decent argument
I'm not convinced though. I imagine if any of the problems you're bringing up are real visa or paypal or whoever could easily spin up new features tailored for ai agents. what's stopping them?
imo bitcoin's value as a transaction mediun comes from censorship resistance, regulatory arbitrage, and privacy. agents don't really need any of these
The card processors can't create tailored features because all payments on the internet (that don't rely on PoW and/or have "instant" settlement) require trust, meaning they require minimized credit risk and longer settlement times, meaning they have to take on large fees for all transactions, making small payments infeasible. They HAVE to move over to rails that have at least instant finality, and that's not possible on any fiat rails and won't ever be unless it's as a CBDC or stablecoin.
And I also would argue that agents need the ability to send payments without risk of being censored (users would want any task they send an agent to do to be performed without hindrance) and privately (users might not want other agents or users to know who was paying for a task). And the regulatory arbitrage in this case is just being able to avoid the need deal with all the credit bs of the banking system, so that's baked in.
