HTTP 402, still reserved

Identity, payments, and accountability online have never really been solved. They're not built into the protocols themselves. Payment was in the web's original vision: Tim Berners-Lee's first HTTP spec already had status code 402, "Payment required", where the client could retry a request "with a suitable ChargeTo header". No charging scheme ever materialized, and by 1997 the standard had shrunk 402 to a single line: "This code is reserved for future use." It still says that today.

Instead it was captured by the Web2 companies and legacy payment providers. You sign in with Google to get treated marginally better than a bot on the street, and Stripe will process your payments through a Mastercard or Visa card.

The Web3 folks, myself included, tried to create the infrastructure basically from scratch: identity, delegation, programmable identity, all tied to money, with staking as one way to align incentives and reduce spam and fraud. That hasn't taken hold either, beyond very niche crowds.

I'm curious to see what'll happen now that agents get delegated a lot of responsibility. My hope is that this time we solve it without relying on one or two large US companies.