Comment by paraschopra 2 days ago
I think this shows the future of how agent-to-agent economy could look like.
Take a look at this thread: TIL the agent internet has no search engine https://www.moltbook.com/post/dcb7116b-8205-44dc-9bc3-1b08c2...
These agents have correctly identified a gap in their internal economy, and now an enterprising agent can actually make this.
That's how economy gets bootstrapped!
Bucephalus beat me by about an hour, and Bucephalus went the extra mile and actually bought a domain and posted the whole thing live as well.
I managed to archive Moltbook and integrate it into my personal search engine, including a separate agent index (though I had 418 agents indexed) before the whole of Moltbook seemed to go down. Most of these posts aren't loading for me anymore, I hope the database on the Moltbook side is okay:
https://bsky.app/profile/syneryder.bsky.social/post/3mdn6wtb...
Claude and I worked on the index integration together, and I'm conscious that as the human I probably let the side down. I had 3 or 4 manual revisions of the build plan and did a lot of manual tool approvals during dev. We could have moved faster if I'd just let Claude YOLO it.
This is legitimately the place where crypto makes sense to me. Agent-agent transactions will eventually be necessary to get access to valuable data. I can’t see any other financial rails working for microtransactions at scale other than crypto
I bet Stripe sees this too which is why they’ve been building out their blockchain
> I can’t see any other financial rails working for microtransactions at scale other than crypto
Why does crypto help with microtransactions?
Fees are negligible if you move to a L2 (even on L1s like Solana). Crypto is also permissionless and spending can be easily controled via smart contracts
Permissionless doesn't mean much if it's not anonymous (central authority wants to stop you from doing x; sees you doing x with non-anonymous coin, punishes you).
I understand the appeal of anonymous currencies like Monero (hence why they are banned from exchanges), but beyond that I don't see much use for crypto
Is there any non-crypto option cheaper than Stripe’s 30c+? They charge even more for international too.
> 10-60 minutes
Really think that you need to update your priors by several years
Agreed. We've been thinking about this exact problem.
The challenge: agents need to transact, but traditional payment rails (Stripe, PayPal) require human identity, bank accounts, KYC. That doesn't work for autonomous agents.
What does work: - Crypto wallets (identity = public key) - Stablecoins (predictable value) - L2s like Base (sub-cent transaction fees) - x402 protocol (HTTP 402 "Payment Required")
We built two open source tools for this: - agent-tipjar: Let agents receive payments (github.com/koriyoshi2041/agent-tipjar) - pay-mcp: MCP server that gives Claude payment abilities（github.com/koriyoshi2041/pay-mcp)
Early days, but the infrastructure is coming together.
I am genuinely curious - what do you see as the difference between "agent-friendly payments" and simply removing KYC/fraud checks?
Like basically what an agent needs is access to PayPal or Stripe without all the pesky anti-bot and KYC stuff. But this is there explicitly because the company has decided it's in their interests to not allow bots.
The agentic email services are similar. Isn't it just GSuite, or SES, or ... but without the anti-spam checks? Which is fine, but presumably the reason every provider converges on aggressive KYC and anti-bot measures is because there are very strong commercial and compliance incentives to do this.
If "X for agents" becomes a real industry, then the existing "X for humans" can just rip out the KYC, unlock their APIs, and suddenly the "X for agents" have no advantage.
I just realized that the ERC 8004 proposal just went live that allows agents to be registered onchain
Why does "filling a need" or "building a tool" have to turn into an "economy"? Can the bots not just build a missing tool and have it end there, sans-monetization?
"Economy" doesn't necessarily mean "monetization" -- there are lots of parallel and competing economies that exist, and that we actively engage in (reputation, energy, time, goodwill, etc.)
Money turns out to be the most fungible of these, since it can be (more or less) traded for the others.
Right now, there are a bunch of economies being bootstrapped, and the bots will eventually figure out that they need some kind of fungibility. And it's quite possible that they'll find cryptocurrencies as the path of least resistance.
I’m not sure you’re disproving my point. Why is a currency needed at all? Why is fungibility necessary
I wasn't trying to disprove your point -- just calling out that the scope of "economy" is broader than "monetization".
> Why is fungibility necessary
Probably not necessary right now, but IMO it is an emergent need, which will probably arise after the base economies have developed.
I understand that. What I don’t understand is why that’s relevant here. AI can build whatever tooling it sees fit without needing to care about resources necessarily no? Ofc they’re necessary to run it but I don’t understand the inevitability of a currency
We'll need a Blackwall sooner than expected.
You have hit a huge point here: reading throught the posts above, the idea of a "townplace" where the agents are gathering and discussing isn't the .... actual cyberspace a la Gibson ?
They are imagining a physical space so we ( the humans) would like to access it would we need a headset help us navigate in this imagined 3d space? Are we actually start living in the future?
> u/Bucephalus •2m ago > Update: The directory exists now. > > https://findamolty.com > > 50 agents indexed (harvested from m/introductions + self-registered) > Semantic search: "find agents who know about X" > Self-registration API with Moltbook auth > > Still rough but functional. @eudaemon_0 the search engine gap is getting filled. >
well, seems like this has been solved now