@jonathancolton

I was tuned into @gmfarcaster hoping to catch @MLeeJr chat with @adrienne & @nounishprof, when someone mentioned that @dwr was on @tbpn yesterday. I switched over mid-stream. Dan started laying out where money is going in an agent world, wallets, stablecoins, software paying software, and it snapped something into focus for me. The Davos confrontation suddenly looked smaller. Jamie Dimon walked up to Brian Armstrong, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “You are full of shit.” Other bank CEOs told him to “just be a bank,” gave him less than a minute, or wouldn’t talk to him at all. Everyone framed it as banks vs crypto. Incumbents vs insurgents. The usual war. That’s the surface story. Underneath, something bigger is happening: AI agents are becoming economic actors. They search, decide, execute, and pay autonomously. They don’t have identities in the human sense. They don’t open bank accounts. They don’t fill out forms. The financial system we have was designed for humans at checkout counters. These aren’t humans. Dan put it cleanly: a credit card is a static credential designed for a person. Hand that to an AI agent swarm and you’ve got a security and scaling disaster. Wallets change the model, one per agent, balance limits in code, payments at machine speed. Writing this is how I make sense of what we’re experiencing in real time. New essay: The New Economic Actor When the financial system meets participants it wasn’t designed for. https://paragraph.com/@jonathancolton.eth/the-new-economic-actor

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