Comment by RadiusTech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RadiusTech | Hacker News Reader

IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary. Machines are likely going to be paying extreme small amounts between each other, so its highly questionable whether that state machine (a) needs to protect for fraud at .001 cents per tx and (b) whether a machine, acting on its own accord, spending .001 was contemplated during the construction of the bank secrecy act (which had the de minimis oversight of transactions at ~82k USD in 2026 values). Ensure no double spend, ensure that the machines can move value as needed, change the state. Ensure that the system scales as much as the volumes of transactions needed. And charge effectively free rates (we're at 10m tx/usd). Lots more to build here, but we're not far off. (and we're launching soon at radiustech.xyz). Come check us out.

have you heard the good news about our lord and savior chaumian cash?

eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.

I imagine you could have some contract that interacts with ecash, based on revelation of a blind signature. Similar to a HTLC.

I have actually written up some ideas for a system based on something like this that I called "chaumian coupons", but I would have to go through my notes to find it.

Indeed, for any particular outcome you could design a custom protocol. In contrast, Radius gives you a generic execution environment. Going custom you lose EVM tooling, audited standard contracts, and every bespoke protocol needs its own security analysis, its own edge case handling, and its own integration work.

That said, the most important loss is composability: an agent can't take your Chaumian coupon escrow and snap it together with someone else's DvP protocol and a third party's rate-limiting wallet in a single atomic transaction. The power of a shared execution environment is that these interaction patterns don't need to be anticipated and designed around in advance. Agents aren't going to negotiate which custom protocol to use for every interaction (the necessary protocol might not even exist!), they will use shared infrastructure where composability of various primitives is the effortless default.

I think that in the large, efficiency does matter. You are optimizing a three-variable problem of efficiency, decentralization, and configuration of the smart contracts.

The fact that AI agents are involved does not nessisarially tilt the scale towards the configurability of smart contracts. If you have extra cognition, you can probably spend some time thinking about what specialized protocol to use.

I am pessimistic on etherium and similar "open-ended" scripting cryptocurrencies because everything they can do can be replicated with a specialized cryptocurrency. So as soon as some killer app emerges (e.g. ENS) people will realize that it's more cheap/fast/decentralized to do this with a specialized system (e.g. namecoin).

The open-ended systems like etherium can only succeed if there is demand for constantly-novel open-ended scripting that interacts with other open-ended scripts all the time. I really don't think that's the case. If you can capture 90% of the use case with different specialized cryptocurrencies and do atomic swaps between them, that will always be better from a technological standpoint.

The fundamental limit of cryptocurrencies is bandwidth, and how much data you can sync between all nodes: either you have a few high-bandwidth nodes or many low-bandwidth nodes. Splitting different contracts across networks is naturally better than sharing a single blockchain and competing for gas.

People don't want this to be the case because you can't achieve vendor/cryptocurrency lock in, and "competition is for losers". If you have multiple independent blockchains, you pretty much must have multiple tokens. But it's true.

The moat for "utility" smart-contract systems is dependent on the cost of switching, which will be lowered by AI if anything. At the end of the day you can just fork the blockchain if you don't like the tokenomics or even just the fees. Some assembly required, but that is why stuff like litecoin can exist in this market.

Sounds centralized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com