A library of snippets
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The system does not have to be organised like this. It is possible, at least partially, to separate money from credit provision, with banks and stablecoins coexisting and non-banks carrying out more of the credit provision role.
From: The new stablecoin regime.
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Mandel remains enchanted by space but is skeptical that humans are the optimal trailblazers. Robots, rovers, probes, and other artificial space ambassadors could do the job for a fraction of the price and without risk to life, limb, and other corporeal vulnerabilities.
“A decentralization of self needs to occur,” she writes. “A dissolution of anthropocentrism, so to speak. And a recognition that future space explorers may not be man, even if man moves through them.”
From: The case against humans in space | MIT Technology Review.
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in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,”
From: Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge.
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In that court filing Google said that:
“The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline and Plaintiffs’ divestiture proposal would only accelerate that decline, harming publishers who currently rely on open-web display advertising revenue.”
The people who run Google are not stupid, and they have seen what the transition to the post-web (that is, the web but for AI agents, not for people) will mean.
Is it time to start thinking about micropayments again? In particular, since most everything on the post-web will be produced by AI and since most everything on the post-web will be consumed by AI, is time to start thinking about AI-AI micropayments?
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I’m not the only person who was wondering about this. The noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows more about the web than I ever will, and back in 2012 he told a Wired magazine conference in New York that “we should have built payments in the browser”.
(They got half way, because buried in your browser, in addition to the familiar error 404 for page-not-found, there is also error 402 for page-requires-payment. But no payment mechanism was provided.)
I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.
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“When Berners-Lee and his team were building the world wide web and designing HTTP and HTMP standards, they included error codes such as ‘500: internal server error’, or ‘404: page not found’. In the early 90s, they were trying to realise Licklider’s vision and setting out the rules for how we were all going to interact over this information network. One long-standing error code is ‘402: payment required’. The original intention – the reason 402 is reserved for future use – was that this code would be used to transact digital cash or micropayments. It has never been implemented – and the Collisons argue this is the reason tech is turning from an equal access opportunity to an oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion.”
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In Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs, Nick Szabo pinpointed a truth that technologists often overlooked: while computational costs (like processing payments, preventing fraud, or validating cryptography) can be driven down, the mental overhead of deciding, monitoring, or worrying about every tiny expense remains stubbornly high.
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This is why I was so interested to see that Louis Amira, Stripe’s former head of crypto & AI partnerships, and David Noel-Romas, Stripe’s former head of crypto engineering, have raised $19 million in seed funding for their new venture Circuit & Chisel. They are launching ATXP, a new protocol that enables AI agents to handle the commerce lifecycle (from discovery to payment) autonomously. The protocol, which be compatible with other new developments in the space such as Coinbase’s X.402 protocol. What particularly caught my eye was their intention for ATXP to enable low cost micropayments that are initiated, negotiated and executed entirely by agents.
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Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said that AI agents will soon become the top users of stablecoins.
During an interview with Bloomberg published on Wednesday, Novogratz said that “in the not-so-distant future, the biggest user of stablecoins is going to be AI.”
From: AI Agents to be top stablecoin users: Galaxy’s Novogratz.
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The biggest US-listed companies keep talking about artificial intelligence. But other than the “fear of missing out”, few appear to be able to describe how the technology is changing their businesses for the better.
From: America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides.
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Ultimately the degree of trust we give to our prime AI agent — the one we interact with all day every day — will be a score that is boasted about, contested, shared, and advertised widely. In other domains, like a car or a phone, we take reliability for granted.
AI is so much more complex and personal, unlike other products and services in our lives today,
the trustworthiness of AI agents will be crucial and an ongoing concern. Its trust quotient (TQ) may be more important than its intelligence quotient (IQ). Picking and retaining agents with high TQ will be very much like hiring and keeping key human employees.
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Public-opinion research commissioned by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), published for the first time in this paper, shows that digital ID enjoys majority support among the British public, with 62 per cent in favour and just 19 per cent opposed.
From: Time for Digital ID: A New Consensus for a State That Works.
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Meta will be required to put in place measures to address scam advertisements, accounts, profiles and business pages impersonating key government office holders on Facebook as part of enhanced measures by the government against such scams.
From: Singapore to order Meta to curb Facebook impersonation scams in first such directive – CNA.
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Hyperliquid holds about $5.97 billion in USDC balances, equal to roughly 8.2% of USDC’s total supply. Based on current federal funds rates, those deposits would generate more than $250 million annually in interest income for Circle and its partner Coinbase. USDH is designed to redirect that yield into Hyperliquid’s own ecosystem. If adoption succeeds, Circle could lose a substantial revenue stream while Hyperliquid strengthens its independence from external providers.
From: Hyperliquid Turns Up The HYPE —And The Heat On Circle’s USDC.
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International payments group Swift is creating its own blockchain in order to facilitate transactions between global banks, as it seeks to compete with the growing stablecoin industry.
Swift said on Monday that it would work with Bank of America, Citigroup and NatWest, among other banks, to create a shared digital ledger that would be used to facilitate transactions in tokenised products including stablecoins.
Swift said the move would improve cross-border transactions and that the blockchain would allow it to “record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts”.
From: Swift to launch blockchain in response to rise of stablecoins.
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Mr Birch said he was keen to distinguish the difference between his support for an improved digital ID infrastructure and a digital ID card.
From: ‘Intrusive’ digital ID cards were a flop 15 years ago – so what’s changed? | The Independent.
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Snippings