Throughout bitcoin’s life, it has fought an uphill battle against fiat currencies that mostly do the job of money. Obviously, fiat has plenty of problems, but when it comes to impacts that are immediately visible to ordinary people in large parts of the world, bitcoin is not 10 times better. Some may even conclude that they would prefer a system based on neutral money to government real, but entrenched fiat systems work well enough that few want to deal with the hassle of constant conversion. With the rapid growth in the capabilities of agents, a large gap has opened that bitcoin has a chance to fill. Instead of competing with entrenched interests as you would with fiat, in the agent payments field, everyone is starting from scratch.
In a recent post on Spiral’s Substack, I pointed out that all payment standards being developed for AI agents have yet to get off the ground. Credit cards don’t work in a world where automated tools make purchases. The web is full of captchas and heavy investment in blocking bots instead of enabling their use for trading. Although they offered payment methods that agents could use, few merchants today have websites that agents can reasonably navigate. Whatever payment method agents ultimately use will require every merchant to adapt to a new world.
Since no one company owns both the agent and merchant side of the marketplace, this leaves a wide-open opportunity where it’s still anyone’s game. Even better, with the popularity of open source agents today, no one company owns much of the buy side at all! If the bitcoin community plays its cards right, there is a good shot at a large portion of future commerce flowing over open rails not controlled by any single company.
However, there is still much to build, and almost all players in the payment industry are trying to position themselves to take the crown. Visa is working on an “Intelligent Commerce” product, OpenAI and Stripe announced Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Google announced AP2 and Coinbase announced an extension of it to crypto – x402. The Bitcoin community’s lack of central planning makes responding with their own options more chaotic and harder to follow, but this is also its strength: many people trying many different approaches to achieve the same goal are more likely to succeed than a single focused approach that can be wrong.
With Lightning surpassing a billion dollars in monthly transactions and Square enabling Lightning for its personal merchants, it seems the technology is finally here that will allow bitcoin to cross the chasm and become everyday money. Some ideological merchants have accepted bitcoin for years, and as we continue to integrate bitcoin wallets into agents, we will create even more reasons for every merchant who wants to sell things to participate. But for it to work, bitcoiners need to step up and use the tools at their disposal. If people don’t try to buy things with bitcoin, merchants won’t care.
Fortunately, these days you don’t need code to build tools that find merchants that accept bitcoin payments. You don’t even have to sell your stack to buy things with bitcoin. Install an agent, give it a wallet, give it some bitcoin, and ask it to buy your monthly beef tallow subscription. Tell the email merchants it wants to buy from and ask them to support bitcoin. Point it to the Bitcoin Merchant Community and have it explain to every merchant it comes across that it will pay them without Visa taking a cut, but was unable to.
Thanks to extensive existing work, bitcoin is already one of the best ways to enable automated online trading. Instead of merchants having to fill their websites with captchas to prevent bots from using stolen credit cards and handle chargebacks, many bitcoin payment processors can provide merchants with local currency within a day. Instead of being exposed to the risk that an operator’s single private key could seize their stablecoins, merchants can choose from many payment processors, whether foreign or domestic. This competition drives down fees and means we don’t build new toll rails on a platform that will inevitably seek higher rents once its dominance is cemented.
These issues are not top of mind for most, but we need to get the new rails right. Stablecoins look good at first glance, but moving to a world where one company (Coinbase) owns both the platform (Base) and earns all the interest on the currency float (USDC) where payments are made is not a recipe for long-term success. When everyone is locked into using one payment method, it won’t be practical to switch away when the operator increases fees. It doesn’t matter if the protocol agents use to communicate with traders is based on an “open standard”. If the vast majority of agents only have funds on one platform, and the vast majority of traders only accept funds on one platform, it will be impossible to switch.
While bitcoin has come a long way on its journey to becoming a reserve asset, it is only beginning its path towards everyday money. Bitcoin reaching escape velocity on the first does not mean the second is guaranteed; actually far from it. With so much competition from every payments industry player, not to mention stablecoins, there is a lot of outreach and work to be done to build payments momentum. Still, we cannot let this opportunity pass us by. If you believe that trading should be done on neutral money instead of corporate gatekeepers, it’s time to act.
This is a guest post by Matt Corallo. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.