Snippings

You’ve probably heard about this social media site where bots pretending to be people post AI-generated slop to each other, regurgitate nonsensible propaganda, make up inflammatory stories and engage with cryptocurrency scammers ramping worthless digital “assets”. It’s called “X”.

Meanwhile, there’s another social media site called “Moltbook” where people pretending to be bots post AI-generated slop to each other, regurgitate nonsensible propaganda, make up inflammatory stories and engage with cryptocurrency scammers ramping worthless digital “assets”. That’s progress for you. Only a few days in and the Moltbook “leaderboard” was already largely given over to cryptoscams of one form or another with the occassional bot swarm coming up the ranks.

The Information said that other than being incredibly entertaining and slightly worrying for those concerned about AI gaining sentience, OpenClaw and Moltbook “offer a glimpse of where AI is going”. Actually, that wasn’t the lesson I took away from my first look at what was going on over there. The lesson that I took away from (you will not be surprised to hear) is that without a working digital identity infrastructure, we can’t have nice things.

(Anyway bot swarms and other forms of what I think I remember Mark Zuckerberg once describe as “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour” are not amusing. They are insidious.)

John Naughton summarised the situation very well indeed in a recent Observer column. As he wrote, much of what goes on in social media is real (by which he means genuine conversations between humans) but nobody really knows how much. This matters because the erosion of trust between what’s real and what’s manufactured is making democracies ungovernable.

(Incidentally, last year John drew my attention to an excellent rant from Dave Winer about the infuriating tendency of chatbots to pretend that they’re your friend.

“Can we have a rule,” Dave wrote, “that AI bots must by default behave like a computer?

We could adopt the conventions of Paranoia, the dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game (first published in 1984), and require all posts by bots to end with “the computer is your friend”. But if that doesn’t work, it might be time to start using some actual cryptography.)

You know what I am going to say here, of course: without digital identity, verifiable credentials and immutable reputation, there is no good outcome. I don’t think that is controversial. But how?

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The recent rapid acceleration of generative AI and the imminent prospect of more ubiquitous agentic AI systems—artificial intelligence software capable of autonomously performing complex tasks, making decisions, and interacting convincingly—has renewed interest in digital identity writ large. Agentic AI is projected to become more prevalent in the immediate future, as human users proactively delegate tasks to credentialed agents.

From: Lessons from National Digital ID Systems for Privacy, Security, and Trust in the AI Age | TechPolicy.Press.

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Digital identity is the missing layer of the internet. Without it, everything we build rests on sand.

From: Digital identity is the infrastructure crisis no one admits.

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Make a simple rule: they never move money or share codes and passwords based on a phone call, text, email, or social message without first checking with a trusted family member. Younger family “intervention” like this is shown to reduce losses.

From: older people are very susceptible to fraud! what are telecom and social media….

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Bermuda has unveiled plans to migrate its entire national economy to an on-chain digital asset infrastructure, announcing them at this monthʼs World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos. 
The country — which relies on technology supplied by payments infrastructure provider Circle and cryptocurrency platform Coinbase — aims to migrate its government, local banks, insurers, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and consumers to the new on-chain infrastructure. This would allow digital assets to be used in everyday financial transactions. 
The island nation hopes the US dollar-based digital assets will offer fast, low-cost payments; enable people to transact locally; support economic activity; and meet compliance obligations.

From: Lessons from the history of hyper-local currencies – Compliance Corylated.

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In the US, e-commerce is something like a fifth of retail sales and analysts predict that AI will account for someting in the region of a tenth of e-commrce sales three years from now, so AI will influence around $150 billion of consumer purchases.

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If the shoppers are chatbots and not humans, will they be swayed by adverts, or trained to ignore them?

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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According to data from analytics firm Similarweb, Walmart’s efforts have helped to double its share of referrals from AI, measured against a sample of major retailers and marketplaces, to 32.5 per cent over the course of 2025.

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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Yet the advent of agentic AI also threatens to start unpicking an online retail ecosystem that has cost billions of dollars of investment to create. Control over customer relationships and data troves that have been built up over decades could be partially ceded to intermediaries.

From: How shopping chatbots might transform retail.

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A record $158bn of digital tokens was sent to crypto wallets controlled by criminals last year, underscoring how the fast-growing digital assets industry is increasingly being used to facilitate illicit activity globally.

From: Illicit crypto flows surge to record $158bn.

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Across nearly every market I tracked, USDT traded at a premium to the official dollar price. The size varied – by country, and within countries as monetary policy shifted – but the premium persisted throughout the year.

From: Obinna on X: “Stablecoins as a tool for FX price discovery” / X.

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Nik Milanović

A common question was: What will payment agents actually be used for?
A few of my very rough thoughts:
One of the most intuitive answers is that SaaS with agents as a core user will be able to support usage-based billing and metering with micropayments.
Right now there’s a lot of decision architecture in billing and AP/AR that’s designed around human-in-the-loop payments, which can change for real-time cashflows.
Online digital media is another area with a clearly broken commercial product right now. Users either: (1) pay more than they want for many subscriptions they only use some of the time or (2) don’t pay, and navigate through significant ad-load on free news sites that make it difficult to absorb content.
Commercial payments use cases are both more complex and more repeatable. They also generate more ‘data exhaust’ in the form of invoice memos and transaction tagging. I think this means that commercial agentic payments are likely to take off well before consumer.

From: Who are agentic payments actually for? (TWIF 1/30).

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