I do want it to work, so just curious does anyone have any positive anecdotes? Can this naturally get picked up by crawlers?
The problem was never the lack of a way to pay you, they just don't care if the transaction is fair.
Admittedly, the price that most will be willing to pay is indeed capped by the cost of the alternatives (bypassing anti-scraping measures via proxies, etc). Still, that means that there's a nonzero rational price.
Far cheaper to just use your hyper-intelligence machines to bypass the anti-scraping measures than to pay everyone.
As of today you can only block the scattershot scrapers trying to slurp up everything at minimal effort/cost. Thankfully those make up the vast majority of traffic, so even dead-simple measures like Anubis block them. Whereas an advanced scraper is getting through any technical measures you can conceivably put in place (including the SOTA paid/cloud offerings). At the high end, the agents just drive regular browsers, mobile device, etc. running through a residential proxy / mobile CGNAT'd ip, solving captcha's in real-time, reasoning about the protection measures in place + adapting in real-time, etc. etc. They are virtually indistinguishable from humans. If you want humans to be able to see your content, the bots will too, as your average bot can now be far smarter + faster + adaptable than your average human.
Payment are not made for "presumably". The website should offer a clear contract: "to turn off anti-scraping measures for X amount of time, pay $Y".
- The per-API-call return probably needs to be fairly high with obvious value to justify paying for something. Downloading a .tar.gz of the site, rather than a crawler.
- The world seems to be reforming political blocks, so it'll likely be a cross-bloc transaction where the two sides don't have a fiat transfer system available for use.
- Probably something that is politically sensitive in the customer's bloc.
So my guess would be that the first use case will be some illegal service that could have been implemented with an AWS Lambda, probably hosted somewhere questionable (Russia a candidate). Probably branching out into politically sensitive topics.
> People joking that the only people putting money into x402 are the people testing to see if x402 works.
It'll be that way until suddenly it works for someone, like how bitcoin was a joke up until some tipping point where the financiers started moving in. It'll take a big kick initially to convince people figuring out crypto is worth it just for the sake of making a web trade.
99% of the big companies provide a standardized known way of paying stuff everyone is used to use.
Its a credit card.
Whatever happens somehow in the background, no one cares.
EDIT: And that's without mentioning the value of machine-readable payment requests, which is what x402 actually brings.
Sure it’s a per-vendor setup, so you might need to do this for each 3rd party that requires payment, or use something like openrouter with a pool of funds.
Probably simpler than setting up and using x402.
I'm even less inclined to put tens of dollars into something my agent thinks might be interesting, but I wouldn't be opposed to putting a dollar in a "browsing budget" for the day.
Nobody is, which is exactly why x402 will never gain widespread adoption.
I mean, that's kinda what x402 is, no? I buy UDSC from Coinbase and then pay $0.05 to a site via AI and via x402.
I mean i pay a drink for a euro with a credit card. Whats the big business behind 'pay per visit'?
I don't think I understand what you're getting at. Unionized factory workers all get paid the same amount, modulo seniority and other factors, and there is no steep income gradient among auto workers because of this. Is that not a "human endeavor"?
>Just because a few heavy hitters earn the most revenue doesn't mean the model is broken.
The model is broken because the vast majority of blogs are trash. The writers are simply not entitled to be paid by the pageload, because the content is not worth paying for. The large earners are the exception that proves the rule.
Fuck that noise. I'm not paying before I have even had a chance to see what the content is.
Eeh, have you find any crawler software that actually supports that protocol? I've seen lots of websites implementing support for it, but do people really implement support for a protocol before they see user-agents who could technically use it? If you're seen those user-agents, which ones are they?
No one is willingly going to tack on a variable cost to their business revenue model. At best, the crawlers/users will simply skip your hosts, or operate in places where gleaning data is still perfectly legal. =3
It also means that if this starts getting any traction, then we could expect to start a nice bump in prepaid debit card adoption.