"The old business model for the internet was a distraction" @samrags_ worked on Google Ads, a business that generates $300 billion a year. Every dollar of an ads business depends on getting a person to look at an ad shown to them while they are shopping for something else, whereas an agent doing the same shopping doesn't care for ads. Checkouts, flight bookings and product searches were never designed for agents to use in the first place. "It was actually built to block bots." He and his co-founder @rsproule started @merit_systems two years ago, after a stretch at Google and a16z. Merit built x402scan on top of Coinbase's x402 payment standard. It is a directory of what an AI agent can buy on its own. Sales teams can pull contact details through it, hedge funds can buy satellite imagery, and developers can even rent GPUs. It launched with about 100 items and now has close to 50,000. They then built AgentCash, the wallet the agent can pay from. The same balance on AgentCash works on both of the available machine payments standards - x402 and MPP. "The universe of agent payments today is very, very small. We're in the first inning, and we're talking 100 to 1000x growth in the next five years." Sam's full conversation with @_zacharyhughes: 2:46 - Choosing software over mechanical engineering 4:27 - How the internet got built in 1997 5:20 - How the web almost charged for every page 6:29 - Working on Google Ads, and the 2016 report 7:41 - Why the old internet ran on distraction 8:56 - Why agents will not use browsers or websites 9:35 - Why Instagram and TikTok are safer than Google 13:48 - What agents still cannot buy 15:49 - Where AI money went before ChatGPT 17:02 - Why your agent should answer to you 20:31 - Launching x402scan, and the boom that followed 22:32 - Inside AgentCash 24:12 - Buying data that only coders could reach 25:05 - Why checkouts block agents 27:35 - The business model for agent payments 32:21 - Why stablecoins fit agent payments 34:38 - What is holding stablecoins back 37:02 - Who Amazon's shopping assistant works for 38:00 - Open checkouts or private platform deals Episode 0056. Presented to you by @altitude