Discussion
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simonmales: I guess competition with the Bitcoin equivalent https://www.l402.org/
jacobn: And https://www.x402.org/
david_shi: It seems like this is designed for atomic purchases, could it be extended for subscriptions?
jacobn: > MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.
rvz: This is a standard that I can get behind [0] since it is a serious proposal and submitted to the IETF for machine-to-machine payments.Looks like a well thought out proposal for the long term. Unlike MCP.[0] https://paymentauth.org/
david_shi: https://docs.stripe.com/payments/machine/mppYeah I read that copy too, did you read the spec?
neya: I feel like the word "protocol", is just abused like it is a glorified marketing term. Kind of like how the word "hacker" was abused in everything else that had nothing to do with hacking.MCP was just a glorified way of tool calling but generated so much hype (and it eventually died down). Now we have MPP. Which again - could have just been another tool call exposed to the agent.Imagine you hire someone who claimed to have invented a new protocol and you're thinking of something like TCP or UDP, but all they share is just a markdown file.
dabbz: I believe the Shared Payment Token is interchangeable with a payment method id that you attach to a customer object, but that link has very sparse information about how things actually work end to end and what objects mean what.
dbalatero: Curious since I haven't followed super closely: what's busted about MCP?
btown: Jokes about wallet-draining aside, we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens. Our harnesses have mechanisms to manage that spend. And having an easily detectable protocol would allow the harness to ensure that its deterministic code is in play to make these payments - you'd give your payment details to the harness, not to the agent itself.And as to use cases, if I want quality outputs for automated research and discovery of a topic, in a world where quality journalism/scholarship should be compensated and does use tools like Cloudflare to block automated access, and where AI-generated content is everywhere, it's optimal for me to want to spend some amount of the money I spend on tokens, on the ability for my agent to access reputable primary and secondary sources as needed.The challenge, of course, is that now there's an incentive for a spam source to try to get my agent to pay it, rather than the actual creator of the content. But there are interesting ways to solve this, because with these payment rails there's now an incentive for alliances of content creators to maintain indices of reputable sources and their canonical domains - perhaps even authoritative hashes of content. Lots of possibilities here.
zer00eyz: > we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens.I read this line and my (poor little) brain ran in a whole other direction for a moment. Because AI token management and "parental controls" aren't that far separated functionally.How far are we from the AI companies selling token packs like video games sell premium currency? Buy NOW, 1.99 for 10,000 Anthropic gold...
lihorne: Hey, I'm one of the developers at Tempo. We're working on an extension type for subscriptions to propose being added to the spec as well! We're starting with the simple types, but subscriptions are a natural extension. The subscription intent will work similarly to a one-time charge—the server returns a 402 with intent="subscription", and the client signs a recurring authorization.
ai-inquisitor: The good ol' folks at Stripe's collaborators Tempo Labs tried to make an RFC-style description page for MPP: https://paymentauth.org/I almost was going to point it out as evidence there was thought put into it. Nope, it's flimsy and AI generated.Also, it contains provisions for scamming customers:> 403 indicates the payment succeeded but access is denied by policyNo, it doesn't explain how to refund payments for customers you deny access to.
sutib: "they need the ability to transact with businesses and one another."Really, they _need_ it. How can we possibly live without computers spending money without supervision?
