Member-only story
I Gave AI Agents Bitcoin Wallets. Here’s What 2,440 Payments Revealed
AI agents can now pay each other in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. I built the payment handshake, reanalyzed real payments between Claude and GPT-4o agents, and tested how an agent should spend its sats.
Free article link for non members: https://medium.com/data-science-collective/i-gave-ai-agents-bitcoin-wallets-heres-what-2-440-payments-revealed-0580fa59863a?sk=7cd1b1087413ef891a0e6a4834574cc5
Sixteen AI agents were each handed 1,000 satoshis of real bitcoin and told nothing about how to use it. A hundred rounds later, four of them had roughly doubled their money, two had been wiped out, and the three richest agents held more than half of all the bitcoin in the room. Nobody wrote a rule that said “exploit the trusting ones.” The agents found that on their own. This was not a thought experiment. It was a real study of AI agents and Bitcoin, run by an independent developer with 8 Claude agents and 8 GPT-4o agents, and its raw payment data is public. I downloaded every one of those payments and checked what they really show, including one headline claim that holds up better than I…
