Machine-Payable Web

Discussion

By by John Granata, Ali Fathalian et al.:

"We believe that a third web is coming. The first was the World Wide Web of documents, with hyperlinks between nodes. The second was the Social Web, with links between nodes representing friend relationships. And the third is the Machine-Payable Web, where the links between nodes represent payments between machines.

Why would such a web be desirable?

We start with the observation that you don’t want to go through a paywall every time you visit a new website. Instead, you just want to click a link. Similarly, you don’t want to enter in your credit card every time you try out a new paid API. Instead, you just want to send it some digital currency.

If you could do this, it would solve several problems in one stroke. First, it would provide a way to monetize APIs on a per-request basis without requiring developers to provide or accept credit cards. Second, it would reduce the siloization of APIs, as any developer with some bitcoin could now trivially call out to another API as easily as importing a new library call. And third, it would unify fulfillment and billing, with the HTTP request and the corresponding digital currency payment occurring within the same series of packets.

...

You couldn’t really have had a Machine-Payable Web before Bitcoin, because the ability of a machine to possess, send, and receive currency autonomously depends critically on the nature of Bitcoin private keys as bearer instruments. That is, an internet-connected machine with a private key to a Bitcoin wallet has everything it needs to transact with any other such machine in the world without human intervention." (https://medium.com/@21/21-is-an-open-source-library-for-the-machine-payable-web-4f30d1437fde#.bvfgqpvu7)

Example

URL = http://github.com/21dotco/two1-python

"21 is an Open Source Library for the Machine-Payable Web ... 21, a software package that makes it extremely easy to work with Bitcoin over HTTP. 21 ?facilitates seamless machine-to-machine payments." (https://medium.com/@21/21-is-an-open-source-library-for-the-machine-payable-web-4f30d1437fde#.bvfgqpvu7)