Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Has a Golden Opportunity With AI Agents, It’s Time to Build
For all of bitcoin’s life, it has been fighting an uphill battle against fiat currencies that mostly do the job of being money. Obviously, fiat has plenty of issues, but when it comes to impacts immediately visible to everyday people in much of the world, bitcoin isn’t 10x better. Some may even conclude that they would prefer a system based on neutral money to government-rigged ones, but entrenched fiat systems work well enough that few want to deal with the hassle of constant conversion. With the rapid growth in agents’ capabilities, a huge gap has opened that bitcoin has a shot at filling. Instead of competing with entrenched interests as you would with fiat, in the agentic payments field, everyone is starting from zero.
In a recent post on Spiral’s Substack, I pointed out that all of the payment standards being developed for AI agents haven’t yet gotten off the ground. Credit cards won’t work in a world where automated tooling is making purchases. The web is filled with captchas and heavy investments in blocking bots, rather than enabling their use for commerce. Even if they offered payment methods that agents could use, few merchants today have websites that agents can reasonably navigate. No matter what payment method agents ultimately use, it will require every merchant to adapt to a new world.
With no one company owning both the agent and merchant sides of the marketplace, this leaves a wide-open opportunity where it’s still anyone’s game. Better yet, with the popularity of open-source agents today, no company owns much of the purchasing side at all! If the bitcoin community plays its cards right, there’s a good shot at a large part of the future of commerce flowing over open rails not controlled by any single company.
There’s still a lot to build, however, and nearly every payments industry player is trying to position itself to take the crown. Visa is working on an “Intelligent Commerce” product, OpenAI and Stripe announced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), Google announced AP2 and Coinbase announced an extension of it for crypto – x402. The bitcoin community’s lack of central planning makes responding with their own options more chaotic and harder to follow, but that’s also its strength: lots of people trying lots of different approaches to achieve the same goal are more likely to succeed than a single, focused approach that might be wrong.
With Lightning surpassing a billion dollars in monthly transactions and Square enabling Lightning for its in-person merchants, it seems the technology is finally here that will let bitcoin cross the chasm and become everyday money. Some ideological merchants have been accepting bitcoin for years, and as we continue to integrate bitcoin wallets into agents, we’ll create yet more reasons for every merchant that wants to sell things to join in. But for that to work, bit