Throughout bitcoin’s life, it has been fighting an uphill battle against fiat currencies that do more of the work of being money. Obviously, fiat has a lot of problems, but when it comes to immediate tangible impacts for everyday people around the world, bitcoin isn’t 10 times better. Some might conclude that they would prefer a system based on a neutral currency to the government’s forgotten ones, but fixed fiat systems work so well that few want to go through the hassle of constant conversions. With the rapid growth of agent capabilities, a huge gap has opened up that bitcoin has a shot at filling. Instead of competing with entrenched interests as you would with fiat, in the agency fees sector, everyone is starting from zero.
In a recent post on Spiral’s Substack, I pointed out that all the payment standards being developed for AI agents have yet to take off. Credit cards won’t work in the world where automatic devices are purchased. The web is full of captchas and heavy investment in preventing bots, rather than allowing their commercial use. Even if they offered payment methods that agents could use, few sellers today have websites that agents can reasonably navigate. Regardless of which payment method they ultimately use, each merchant will need to adapt to the new world.
With no company managing both the agent and broker sides of the market, this leaves an open window where it’s still everybody’s game. Even better, with the popularity of open source agents today, no one company handles the bulk of the buying process! If the bitcoin community plays its cards right, there is a good picture for a large part of the future of commerce that flows over an open channel that is not controlled by a single company.
Much remains to be done, and almost every player in the payments industry is trying to position themselves to take the title. Visa is working on an “Intelligent Commerce” product, OpenAI and Stripe announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Google announced AP2 and Coinbase announced its crypto expansion – x402. The lack of central planning of the bitcoin community makes responding to their choices chaotic and difficult to follow, but that is also its strength: many people trying many different methods to reach the same goal are more likely to succeed than one, concentrated method that may be wrong.
With Lightning surpassing $1 billion in monthly transactions and Square enabling Lightning for its in-person merchants, it seems the technology is finally here to allow bitcoin to cross the gap and become an everyday currency. Some brokers have been accepting bitcoin for years, and as we continue to add bitcoin wallets to agents, we will create more reasons for every broker who wants to sell things to join. But for that to work, bitcoiners have to step up and use the tools they have. 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 need to sell your stack to buy things with bitcoin. Enter the agent, give them a wallet, give them some bitcoin, and tell them to go buy your monthly beef subscription. Tell it to send an email to the merchants it wants to buy from and ask them to support bitcoin. Point it out to the Bitcoin Merchant Community and explain to any merchant that comes in that they want to pay them without Visa taking a break but they couldn’t.
Due to the amount of work involved, bitcoin is already one of the best ways to enable automated trading on the internet. Instead of merchants filling their sites with captchas to prevent bots from using stolen credit cards and facing chargebacks, many bitcoin payment processors can provide merchants with local currency during the day. Instead of being exposed to the risk that one operator’s private key can take their stablecoins, merchants can choose from multiple payment processors, whether foreign or domestic. This competition drives down payments and means that they are not creating new payment channels in an area that will demand higher rents when its power is strengthened.
These problems are not important to many, but we have to prepare new rails. Stablecoins look good at first, but moving to a country where one company (Coinbase) manages both the platform (Foundation) and earns all interest in the currency float (USDC) where payments are made is not a recipe for long-term success. If everyone is locked into using one payment method, switching as the operator increases fees will not work. It doesn’t matter if the protocol agents use to communicate with vendors is based on some “open standard.” If most agents have money in only one place and most sellers accept money in only one place, switching will not happen.
Although bitcoin has come a long way in its journey to become a reserve asset, it is beginning its path towards everyday currency. Bitcoin reaching escape velocity for the first time does not mean that the second is guaranteed; in fact, far from it. With so much competition from all payment industry players, not to mention stablecoins, there is a lot of communication and work to be done to build payment momentum. However, we cannot let this opportunity pass us by. If you believe that trade should happen with a neutral currency rather than corporate gatekeepers, it’s time to act.
This is a guest post by Matt Corallo. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
