There are some very real and obvious downsides to this approach, of course. Primarily, the risk of privacy and anonymity. That said, I feel like the average person doesn't seem to care about those traits in the social media era.
That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new web. Something like:
* User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL.
* Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our computational resources please".
* User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the tokens attached.
* Server responds.
People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe we're approaching the point where there is one.
The problem is Sam Altman saw this coming a long time ago and is an investor (co-owner?) of this project.
I believe we will see a world where things are a lot more agentic and where applicable, a human will need to be verified for certain operations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
Cloudflare deployed the "hand out tokens to anonymously pass captchas" to throw Tor users a bone.