I implemented x402 across a very heavily crawled site and have yet to see any transactions go through. Possibly it's not working, but I haven't seen any yet. Reading the x402 reddit you see other similar comments. People joking that the only people putting money into x402 are the people testing to see if x402 works.
I do want it to work, so just curious does anyone have any positive anecdotes? Can this naturally get picked up by crawlers?
$5 for 1000 searches. A lot of basic ChatGPT sessions can easily do 30 web searches , which would already cost $0.15 .
This brings up an interesting concern: providing search obviously isn't free. It has been financed through ads thus far. What happens when the majority of searches are done by agents?
Are we going to see all search engines adopting this model? Will this be the future of search engine revenue? May end up more pro-consumer than ads and tracking.
This is not true. The psychology of positive and negative events suggests that to optimize your happiness, you should "lump" negative things and "split" positive things.
People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.
They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.
They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.
anyone using an llm is hard stuck in token micropayments regardless, i doubt one more will make a significant difference to them if it is integrated into pricing well enough
Same, it is built on the USDC stable coin and if crypto has taught me anything it is that it is that people do not trust it (ironically). Companies like Circle do absolutely nothing to protect their users while banks etc have mechanisms by which a user has a path to recourse.
Granted this is for micropayments and each search will most likely cost pennies but it still means loading up some real money into a digital wallet which an agent will blindly (and most likely very inefficiently) spend at its own discretion.
The part I keep coming back to isn't the payment rail, it's what happens before the payment. At $0.005 a search the unit price looks trivial, but the agents I've run don't search once — they re-search the same question with slightly different phrasing when the first results don't quite fit, and each retry is a fresh paid call. Removing the API key also removes the one place I used to see that happening, the monthly bill.
So the missing piece for me isn't 402 itself, it's a budget envelope around it: a per-task cap, client-side dedup/caching of near-identical queries, and a receipt ledger I can audit after the run. Without that, making payment frictionless mostly makes runaway spend frictionless too. Does Brave's proxy do any dedup or idempotency for repeated identical queries, or is that entirely left to the harness?
This may be the least stupid use of the block chain I've ever heard of.
Mind you Visa could have implemented this when everyone first asked back in 1999, but hey here we are. Rather than micro payments instead we let ads do their best to ruin western civilization.
If need to use an API, needs to do: user creation, top-up some money, create a token, store the token somewhere, pass it to the agent... and later renew the token...
With a blockchain, no need for all of that. And you can only pay for few cents, no need to top-up a full 5$ min for each services. If you have dozens of services that you need to reach, the benefits start to be interesting.
nobody wants paid impressions to hit agents, and agents certainly aren’t going to convert, so this model makes perfect sense. once humans realize they too can have the premium experience the agents are getting it will be the end of adtech!
I do want it to work, so just curious does anyone have any positive anecdotes? Can this naturally get picked up by crawlers?
$5 for 1000 searches. A lot of basic ChatGPT sessions can easily do 30 web searches , which would already cost $0.15 .
This brings up an interesting concern: providing search obviously isn't free. It has been financed through ads thus far. What happens when the majority of searches are done by agents?
The idea of paying for usage is actually very appealing.
People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.
They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.
They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.
Granted this is for micropayments and each search will most likely cost pennies but it still means loading up some real money into a digital wallet which an agent will blindly (and most likely very inefficiently) spend at its own discretion.
Time will tell, I guess.
So the missing piece for me isn't 402 itself, it's a budget envelope around it: a per-task cap, client-side dedup/caching of near-identical queries, and a receipt ledger I can audit after the run. Without that, making payment frictionless mostly makes runaway spend frictionless too. Does Brave's proxy do any dedup or idempotency for repeated identical queries, or is that entirely left to the harness?
Mind you Visa could have implemented this when everyone first asked back in 1999, but hey here we are. Rather than micro payments instead we let ads do their best to ruin western civilization.
With a blockchain, no need for all of that. And you can only pay for few cents, no need to top-up a full 5$ min for each services. If you have dozens of services that you need to reach, the benefits start to be interesting.