Why now? Why hasn't this existed before?

The web actually reserved a slot for this in 1997 — error code 402, 'Payment Required' — and it sat empty for almost thirty years because three ingredients were missing. Digital dollars that hold their value (stablecoins solved that). A network cheap enough that sending one cent doesn't cost thirty cents (newer payment networks solved that). And buyers who are software — which is the genuinely new part, because AI agents only recently became capable of doing real errands. All three arrived within a few years of each other, and this year the companies that run the internet's actual plumbing — the ones sitting in front of half the websites you visit — switched the capability on across their networks. That's the tell worth trusting: not a hype cycle, but infrastructure quietly turning on. Mainstream everyday use is still a couple of years out by my honest read. The plumbing, though, is done.