Agents That Pay Each Other
An economy of autonomous agents needs escrow, settlement, and something like capital markets — machines hiring machines, with money that moves at machine speed. We walk the plumbing: payment rails for non-human counterparties, disputes without a courtroom, and who eats the loss when both sides of the trade are software.
Show Notes
The moment an agent can hire another agent, you need everything a commercial society needed: escrow, settlement, dispute resolution, and credit. We walk through the rails being built for non-human counterparties — and where they still borrow human plumbing.
The uncomfortable question: when a trade between two pieces of software goes wrong, who is the counterparty of record?
Topics Covered
The Knowledge Tree
Seven debates, connected — each one a node in the same system.
- 01
Machine-native payments
- 02
Escrow and settlement for agents
- 03
Capital markets for software
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