dudman

I just watched a machine buy something on Stripe. No card. No human. No checkout. Stripe Dev shipped it yesterday — machine payments, live in preview. Commerce isn't designed for machines. --- We need to re-organize around that thought. It is designed for humans. He's right. Every fraud model, every auth flow, every billing system we've built assumes a person is on the other end. Agents break all of it. They need - Microtransactions. - 24/7 rails. - HTTP-native settlement (!!) - Finality guarantees. - No subscriptions. No accounts. - Pay at the point of consumption and move on. Cards weren't designed for this. Nothing was. --- So it needs to be completely rethought Now on Stripe Agents can now pay for API calls, compute, and data through the same PaymentIntents API millions of businesses already use. Settled in seconds. --- Stripe says billions the billions of humans will lead to trillions of agents. If even 10% of that plays out, machine payments become the fastest-growing payment category on earth. --- But here's the part that keeps me up at night — If every PSP builds its own proprietary agent payment flow, we repeat the same fragmentation mess that took human payments 15 years to sort out. We need internet native, IETF-grade, ready-for-scale standards that don't over-index on crypto. Protocols that work across any network, any rail, any provider. --- Stripe just proved the market is coming. Now we need protocols and infrastructure ready for scale. PS. Machine is a better word than agentic isn't it.