X402, a static blog monetization excercise(shtein.me) |
X402, a static blog monetization excercise(shtein.me) |
Happy to answer any questions!
I open https://shtein.me/api/joke in a normal-enough browser (Firefox Nightly with Enhanced Tracking Protection and uBlock Origin). After loading its 2.3MB response (no useful HTML, just a huge inlined JS blob, and served without transfer compression), it asks me to select a wallet. There are two choices.
I select “Injected” and press “Connect wallet” (ugh, why did it require me to click three times instead of just one!?). Nothing discernible happens. No errors or network activity in the dev tools.
I select “Coinbase Wallet” and press “Connect wallet”. It opens a popup window, <https://keys.coinbase.com/connect?sdkName=%40coinbase%2Fwall...>. The TLS connection fails, PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR. Operating on a hunch, I discover it’s blocked in India:
$ curl keys.coinbase.com
The website has been blocked as per order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000.
Not sure quite what to make of that, given that https://www.coinbase.com/en-in/blog/coinbase-launches-in-ind... sounds (from the snippet exposed in a search engine) like Coinbase started fully operating in India five weeks ago.
Can’t say it leaves a positive impression.
The protocol: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
An index of current use: https://l402index.com/
X402 is an open standard backed by the Linux Foundation.
I'm honestly not the biggest fan of the Linux Foundation as a company, nor of many of the names behind X402 (e.g. Coinbase) but if I had to choose between these two standards for something I was implementing, I know which one I'd be less worried about vendor lock-in with.
Hmm, so I will pay to see websites that have ads. This may or may not be fine and solve some other problems (like paywalling AI agents), but lets not be naive. It won't replace ads, in most cases it will just be another stream.
Except it still didn't work. When I used the mobile browser, I clicked the links and it looks like it wanted to take my money, but it returned to the site after going to base, without actually taking money. So then I used the Base app's browser to visit the site. It more convincingly tried to take money out of my wallet but the site returns Request failed: 402, which is confusing, and doesn't actually take my money.
Tell your agent "Set up agentcash.dev and use it to get a joke from http://shtein.me/api/joke"
So... yeah, technically it works but until anybody cares, it doesn't matter.
I didn't even re-installed my wallet for others to get some reward back last time I setup my browser.
Consumers that actually spend (Americans) pay with unsecured credit, crypto ecosystem doesn't have robust unsecured credit systems. It has plenty of secured credit systems though because it is extremely optimal at collecting collateral and settlement, extremely unoptimal at rendering judgements and seizing non-possessed assets. Many applications try unsecured lending and solve nothing or gain no traction, running out of capital to unsecurely lend. This renders x402 for consumer applications dead in the water.
And if consumer applications were unlocked, the law of diminishing returns comes into play immediately as everyone tries to paywall their service, just like seen on Medium and Substack.
x402 is for agents to pay for something they need access to. The agents themselves will be speculators just like the users.
I'm fine being wrong.