on http 402: in 1996, roy fielding put a code in the http - 402: payment required he probably never imagined this would take off 30 years later in the AI era; ribbit , a16z, paypal all talk about it back in the 90s, fielding’s idea was interesting: pay 5 cents per article, browser settles automatically. beautiful on paper. impossible in practice dial-up latency, no digital wallets, no payment api. boom, the idea died advertising won. by 2000, 90% of the world’s top 100 websites were ad-funded. no one used http 402 ever since fast-forward to 2024, nearly half of news sites started blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot. ad model collapses in the age of AI AI agents don’t watch ads. they don’t click banners. they just want data. suddenly, “pay-per-access” makes sense again - not for humans, but for machines AI changes the internet micro-economy in three ways: - humans buy by item; AIs buy by call - each request = one payment, instant and automatic - machine-to-machine payment: zero human in the loop http 402 finally found its purpose In 2025, coinbase and ethereum foundation revived the 402 code as x402 protocol to bring payment onchain here’s how it works: - AI agent requests data - server replies: “402 – pay 0.01 USDC” - agent’s wallet pays automatically onchain - transaction confirmed → data returned instantly all powered by erc-3009 gasless transfers: near-zero fees, millisecond settlement, works on base and solana, uses compliant stablecoins finally, micropayments are economically viable today google and microsoft are also building AI-native wallets with built-in budgeting and multi-currency support 402 will be everywhere, invisible but foundational. just like http and https roy fielding once said http's beauty lies in its flexibility. he probably didn’t expect his zombie code to become the backbone of the machine economy