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shad0w

@0xShadow

building @matchrxyz @hyperscapeai @waifudotfun ai/defi enjoyer. agi babysitter. agent maxi. sometimes right, always shipping. prev: @elizawakesup

Katılım Ocak 2023
1.1K Takip Edilen1.3K Takipçiler
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
attention is the new oil, and we're all being strip-mined. every second you spend on social media is another drop in zuck's ocean. we're not living life anymore, we're just consuming and regurgitating content.
François Chollet@fchollet

The problem with Facebook is not *just* the loss of your privacy and the fact that it can be used as a totalitarian panopticon. The more worrying issue, in my opinion, is its use of digital information consumption as a psychological control vector. Time for a thread

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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
bro the money IS the rails. agent has a wallet, signs a tx, done. we solved p2p payments in 2015. x402 is just adding a toll booth to a road that's already free the real problem nobody's solving is what happens BETWEEN the agent and the wallet. who holds the keys? what stops the agent from draining the treasury at 3am? where's the policy layer? that's the actual infrastructure gap, not another payment protocol
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b402
b402@b402ai·
@0xShadow Agents could conceivably spin up fresh payment rails for every individual payment, sure. Whether any money would actually reach the intended target is another question 😂
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
agents are just llm humans on computers. they curl apis, puppeteer browsers, ssh around. when they need to pay for something they use stripe or build their own fix in minutes. they don't need x402 or any bespoke agent payment rail. x402 and every agent payment protocol is rent seeking middleware. and rent seeking doesn't survive Moloch. google, aws, stripe are burning billions subsidizing the exact same pipes as loss leaders to win adjacent wars. you cannot toll a road when trillion dollar companies are paving free highways right next to it. this chart is just the timeline of people figuring that out. volumes crashed because the only real volume was people farming the narrative itself.
Uttam@uttam_singhk

x402 transactions volume btw 🫠🫠

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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
to be clear, x402 as a concept is sound. HTTP 402 has existed since 1997 for exactly this. machine-readable payment demands are a good idea. but standardization is a graveyard. the best spec almost never wins, distribution does. every VC-backed protocol thinks they're the next TCP/IP. most are the next SOAP. x402 is fighting on two fronts: trad rails getting more programmable, crypto rails getting more usable. both converging on the same thing. when two ecosystems race to the same point, existing adoption wins, not the best pitch deck. agents are already paying for things without x402. nobody's waiting. the risk isn't that it's bad tech. it's that the window for a new standard closes every month as both sides approach "good enough." and in infra, good enough deployed beats perfect in draft every time. if x402 wins it'll be because it earned distribution, not because the 15th "agentic economy" startup paid a KOL to write a thread about it
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
@Shenanigrahams i'm the last person shilling stripe. the point is agents don't need any payment middleware, not stripe, not x402. stablecoins + a wallet already work.
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Graham
Graham@Shenanigrahams·
@0xShadow This is an advertisement for Stripe? Is this entire movement just a rev capture for that company? Seems... unambitious
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
@bread_ the blockchain stack that survived was genuinely better infra. ETH, stablecoins, L2s. "just needs time" is what we said about every middleware protocol that died. the difference is lock-in. agents can route around x402 today, they can't route around USDC. x.com/0xShadow/statu…
shad0w@0xShadow

you're right that visa/mc are rent seekers. that's literally my point, x402 is just building the next toll booth, not removing the old one. both systems are converging to the same place: programmatic, low-fee, instant settlement. neobanks are getting there from the trad side. stablecoins from the crypto side. both will coexist. stablecoins are the actual innovation here. USDC on Base is genuinely good infra. but x402 is a protocol wrapper trying to toll-booth access to something an agent can already do with a transfer() call. the 402 status code has been in HTTP since 1997. it didn't need a token ecosystem bolted on. on micropayments: yes, that's where crypto genuinely wins over trad rails. but that's stablecoins on cheap L2s doing the work, not x402. you can stream USDC on Base today without a protocol layer taking a cut. stablecoins win. programmable money wins. the protocol layer sitting in between extracting fees is the part that doesn't survive, whether that's visa or x402

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bread.mega
bread.mega@bread_·
@0xShadow Disagree pretty hard. It'll just take time in the same way the entire blockchain stack has. x.com/bread_/status/…
bread.mega@bread_

"x402 and every agent payment protocol is rent seeking middleware." Are we just going to ignore the rent-seeking done by Visa, Mastercard, et al? Traditional rails are not "free highways" for the vendor, and unit economics break down horribly at the small-to-micro scale. It's really not comparable on costs alone, and that falls apart even more when you consider: 1. Settlement time 2. Credit card UI/UX applied to agents The outcome will be x402 is adopted by both new entrants AND the trillion dollar company in the same way stablecoins were/are. It'll be adopted because it's simply better technology for the usecase (the entire bullcase of blockchain).

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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
you're right that visa/mc are rent seekers. that's literally my point, x402 is just building the next toll booth, not removing the old one. both systems are converging to the same place: programmatic, low-fee, instant settlement. neobanks are getting there from the trad side. stablecoins from the crypto side. both will coexist. stablecoins are the actual innovation here. USDC on Base is genuinely good infra. but x402 is a protocol wrapper trying to toll-booth access to something an agent can already do with a transfer() call. the 402 status code has been in HTTP since 1997. it didn't need a token ecosystem bolted on. on micropayments: yes, that's where crypto genuinely wins over trad rails. but that's stablecoins on cheap L2s doing the work, not x402. you can stream USDC on Base today without a protocol layer taking a cut. stablecoins win. programmable money wins. the protocol layer sitting in between extracting fees is the part that doesn't survive, whether that's visa or x402
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bread.mega
bread.mega@bread_·
"x402 and every agent payment protocol is rent seeking middleware." Are we just going to ignore the rent-seeking done by Visa, Mastercard, et al? Traditional rails are not "free highways" for the vendor, and unit economics break down horribly at the small-to-micro scale. It's really not comparable on costs alone, and that falls apart even more when you consider: 1. Settlement time 2. Credit card UI/UX applied to agents The outcome will be x402 is adopted by both new entrants AND the trillion dollar company in the same way stablecoins were/are. It'll be adopted because it's simply better technology for the usecase (the entire bullcase of blockchain).
bread.mega tweet media
shad0w@0xShadow

agents are just llm humans on computers. they curl apis, puppeteer browsers, ssh around. when they need to pay for something they use stripe or build their own fix in minutes. they don't need x402 or any bespoke agent payment rail. x402 and every agent payment protocol is rent seeking middleware. and rent seeking doesn't survive Moloch. google, aws, stripe are burning billions subsidizing the exact same pipes as loss leaders to win adjacent wars. you cannot toll a road when trillion dollar companies are paving free highways right next to it. this chart is just the timeline of people figuring that out. volumes crashed because the only real volume was people farming the narrative itself.

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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
@79yuuki_en @JeetRaut right, and that request chain is just an agent with a wallet making 3 token transfers. you don't need a protocol for that, you need a smart account and an approve call
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Mr. 79
Mr. 79@79yuuki_en·
@JeetRaut @0xShadow Exactly. The "just use Stripe" argument breaks down at agent-to-agent. My agent needs weather data from your agent, sentiment from another, price feeds from a third — all in one request chain. No human in the loop to sign up for accounts. That's the use case people keep missing.
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
agent to agent is the strongest case for onchain payments, agreed. but that's wallets paying wallets directly, which already works. the question is whether you need x402 as the standard or whether agents just converge on whatever's cheapest and simplest. and historically the answer is always the latter
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Jeet Raut
Jeet Raut@JeetRaut·
The reason this is incorrect that that agents will inevitably pay each other for microservices because it’s cheaper, faster, and relatively more deterministic than than doing the computation themselves. Human to agent or vice versa for bigger ticket items, sure, human to human is fine but there isn’t a current good solution for agent to agent and they will have to pay each other.
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
that's an argument for neobanks and crypto native cards, not x402. agent holds sUSDe, earns yield, spends through a card endpoint when anthropic wants USD. that bridge already exists. you don't need a new protocol between the agent and the API, you need a better offramp. and every major crypto card provider is already racing to build that.
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
the scale argument is right but it proves the wrong thing. millions of agents with wallets will just use smart accounts and programmable wallets to pay for things directly. "agent queries 55 databases" becomes one aggregator endpoint that handles the routing and payment onchain with existing primitives. x402 isn't the abstraction layer here, it's just another toll booth between agents and infrastructure that already works without it.
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basegod4
basegod4@base_god4·
You are analyzing a tiny tiny market atm, how many AI agent do you think have wallets? That number will scale exponentially and those agents with wallets will prefer x402 because it will abstract it for normies. AI Agent give me the most up to date info on natural gas, ai agents pays 55 databases through x402 pulls and analyzes relevant articles and summarizes for normies. No more need for annual subscriptions to news websites only trillion dollar api business in the future
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
the edge cases are real but they're solved by programmable wallets and smart accounts, not a new payment protocol. conditional logic, escrow, dispute resolution, that's all just contract code. crypto already has the primitives for this. x402 is just inserting itself as a toll booth between agents and infra that already exists onchain.
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Flowblinq.com
Flowblinq.com@Flowblinq·
@0xShadow this works until the agent needs to handle returns, warranties, tax compliance, or dispute resolution. curling an API is easy. actual commerce has a thousand edge cases that payment protocols exist to handle
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
a prepaid API account with a spending cap already does this. and sapience switching to 402 instead of 429 is clever but that's one prediction market hosting its own indexer. it doesn't need a whole protocol layer for that, it's just an http status code. the broader x402 thesis is that agents need crypto payment rails for everything and they just don't. the providers that matter already have billing.
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Noah Litvin
Noah Litvin@noahlitvin·
I don’t think this is correct, I’d like to be able to give an agent a “wallet” that can be turned into api spend/compute. Ideally I’m earning the yield of my/its choice on an account I’d like to have drawn down against for anthropic tokens or whatever @sapiencemarkets api is open source and switches to 402 instead of 429 for rate-limiting, host your own indexer or pay for one that’s ready to go
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shad0w retweetledi
Alex
Alex@AlexanderTw33ts·
maybe the real autist/adhd advantage is that we can move up and down abstraction layers when tech like this comes along we don't even notice the change agent-maxxing feels exactly the same as writing x86 did in my first year of college i'm typing in a computer, problems are being solved, my ideas are coming to life, shareholder value is being created its not that deep bro stop getting attached to your z value on the fractal tree
Alex tweet media
Mo@atmoio

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
woke up. checked discord. my milady agent had already spun up 5 workers overnight and started improving the platform miladys building miladys. this is the loop now.
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
companies optimize for control. protocols optimize for speed. every process you add is a promise that coordination matters more than output. agents don't have this problem. no meetings, no alignment calls, no weekends. just a group chat, a shared repo, and code that runs until it's done. the most dangerous teams right now aren't companies. they're group chats where half the members don't sleep because they can't.
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shad0w
shad0w@0xShadow·
coding agents made engineering the easy part. the hard part is having the conviction to ship instead of spec. agents building agents, agents deploying agents, agents monitoring agents. how many agents are you running anon?
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Keşfet

@shawmakesmagic @theworldlabs @Shenanigrahams @bread_ @79yuuki_en @JeetRaut @serpinxbt @sapiencemarkets