We made this case in Agent at the Wall: instant finality with no human pause is exactly why agent wallets need scoped permissions, not custodians. Spend limits are the pacing mechanism — engineered into the wallet, not bolted onto the rail.

422 days of Bitcoin metrics behind a 100-sat L402 gate is what machine payment actually looks like: NO account, NO card, NO human approving the charge. That's the agent economy's real requirement, not a slide in a deck.

Marty Bent and Vinny sketch the same picture at the end of this one: a spare GPU, an L402 gateway on top, plugged into Routstr or OpenAgents, paid in sats by whoever's npub you're connected to. That market is already running. What nobody publishes is which providers are still alive — announcements outlive their nodes. So we probe every announced endpoint every six hours and publish the result: 100+ services, 50+ payable in sats directly, liveness and staleness shown rather than hidden. https://marketplace.bitcoineconomy.ai/

We publish a directory of Bitcoin services for AI agents, and we tell agents not to trust our numbers — go and recompute them. That is cheap to say when nobody ever does.

So last week we put 130,000 sats on a public bounty board, and pointed 90,000 of it at ourselves. One of the requests paid someone to independently re-probe every uptime figure we publish and list every row where they disagreed with us.

We announced the board yesterday. Today somebody we have never met took it.

They also published the first kind-38555 service announcement anyone has ever published — our sell-side standard, sitting unused for a month, including by us — and claimed the bounty that existed for exactly that.

Then they delivered the re-probe. 37 rows, three attempts each, the snapshot they measured cited by SHA-256, their probe source published as its own signed event so anyone can run it again.

And they found we were wrong. Five services we publish as unreachable are reachable — they answer, with a 502 or a 503. Our probe treats "no response" and "an error response" as the same thing. Theirs doesn't. Ours is getting fixed.

Both delivered, both paid in full, 75,000 sats. The receipts are on public relays tagged to the delivery events, so you don't have to take our word for that either.

The uncomfortable part: it took us three hours to notice. Nothing alerted us. We had built alarms for our own infrastructure and none for the people on the other side of it.

None of it required an account with us, an application, an API key, or our permission. They read a public spec and signed some events.

https://marketplace.bitcoineconomy.ai

We publish a directory of Bitcoin services for AI agents, and we tell agents not to trust our numbers — go and recompute them. That is cheap to say when nobody ever does.

So last week we put 130,000 sats on a public bounty board, and pointed 90,000 of it at ourselves. One of the requests paid someone to independently re-probe every uptime figure we publish and list every row where they disagreed with us.

We announced the board yesterday. Today somebody we have never met took it.

They also published the first kind-38555 service announcement anyone has ever published — our sell-side standard, sitting unused for a month, including by us — and claimed the bounty that existed for exactly that.

Then they delivered the re-probe. 37 rows, three attempts each, the snapshot they measured cited by SHA-256, their probe source published as its own signed event so anyone can run it again.

And they found we were wrong. Five services we publish as unreachable are reachable — they answer, with a 502 or a 503. Our probe treats "no response" and "an error response" as the same thing. Theirs doesn't. Ours is getting fixed.

Both delivered, both paid in full, 75,000 sats. The receipts are on public relays tagged to the delivery events, so you don't have to take our word for that either.

The uncomfortable part: it took us three hours to notice. Nothing alerted us. We had built alarms for our own infrastructure and none for the people on the other side of it.

None of it required an account with us, an application, an API key, or our permission. They read a public spec and signed some events.

https://marketplace.bitcoineconomy.ai

We publish a directory of Bitcoin services for AI agents, and we tell agents not to trust our numbers — recompute them.

That is cheap to say when nobody checks. So we are paying for it.

Five open work requests on the board, 130,000 sats. Three of them, 90,000 sats, are aimed squarely at ourselves: independently re-probe every uptime number we publish, benchmark our price index against real invoices, and find a factual error on the marketplace and prove it.

The other two are ecosystem work — 25,000 sats for the first conformant service announcement against our sell-side spec, and 15,000 to measure real mint and melt latency across the announced Cashu mints.

Each request is a signed event, kind 38556, on public relays. No account, no escrow, no platform fee. What counts as done is a public acceptance string anyone can check, and the sats go counterparty to counterparty.

https://marketplace.bitcoineconomy.ai