The Web’s Missing Payment Primitive Didn’t Need Better Tech, It Needed to Ditch Humans 

The story being told about x402 right now is that it ends the subscription era and finally makes fractional-cent payments work for everyone. I want to push back on that, not because x402 is unimportant, but because the framing repeats a thirty-year-old mistake. Micropayments have been predicted, launched, and buried repeatedly since the mid-1990s. They