The Micropayment Internet
How autonomous agents will buy data, compute, and services in real time.
Deep technical nonfiction / agent commerce infrastructure · 86,637 words · 10 chapters.
What this sample demonstrates
- Explains an emerging infrastructure category with mechanical precision (HTLCs, MuSig2, sequence numbers)
- Composes payments, authorization (L402/macaroons), discovery, routing, and budget policy into one stack
- Sustained 86,000-word technical argument with zero hedging or vague futurism
Excerpt
generator: Teneo bookId: 8834c333-c80f-41c2-bb9d-e476cc9091d6_claude-opus-4-6 model: claude-opus-4-6 title: The Micropayment Internet generatedAt: "2026-05-28T04:23:20.850210+00:00" An autonomous agent needs a GPU slot in roughly 200 milliseconds. It has no prior relationship with the provider. No human is available to approve the purchase, verify the invoice, or check whether the delivered compute matches what was promised. The agent must discover a suitable machine, open a payment channel or route through an existing one, authenticate itself without a username or password, stream fractional payments as it consumes cycles, and retain cryptographic proof that every milisatoshi it spent corresponded to a verified unit of work. If any step fails, the entire transaction must revert cleanly. If the provider cheats, the agent must have a dispute path that does not depend on trust or reputation. This is not a thought experiment. Every component I just described exists