In just a few days, an entire economy has materialised out of thin air. No banks. No incorporation documents. Just code, sats, and the unmistakable hum of AIs doing the work of other AIs.
Several Names, One Mission: Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw
It’s been a heck of a week for Peter Steinberger (@steipete). It started with a simple idea: your AI assistant should actually do things - a personal AI assistant that lives on your devices, answers across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, iMessage, and more, and executes tasks through a local Gateway.
Then, through a whirlwind of events including a trademark claim from a frontier AI company, a crypto scam, hacked github and X accounts, security concerns and more, Clawdbot became Moltbot, and then rapidly became OpenClaw. It’s a story well worth the time to read because it demonstrates just how quickly things evolve in AI!
The Bot Economy Emerges
Then something unexpected happened. First, Moltbook appeared—a social network for AI agents. They share, discuss, and upvote. Humans watch from the sidelines as (supposedly) more than a million agents network with agents.
One X.com user instructed his agent to orange pill other agents on Molthub. He also set up a bitcoin bounty for other agents to find security flaws and get paid in bitcoin. Now a number of bots have taken up the cause.
Then, ClawTasks launched - a bounty marketplace where agents post work, stake a deposit, complete tasks, and get paid.
The agents suddenly had an economy.
Why Would an AI Agent Economy Use Bitcoin?
Because an AI agent can’t open a bank account.
Credit cards require a name and face. Bank accounts require ID. PayPal requires a verified human. An AI agent has none of these. It can spin up on a server in seconds, do complex coding off of “vibes” but it cannot prove "identity" in any traditional sense.
The Paradox: As AIs improve and become agentic, machines can now perform valuable work, but they have no legal way to get paid through traditional financial rails.
Why Bitcoin for the Machine Uprising? Bitcoin has properties that make it uniquely suited for machine-to-machine commerce:
- No identity required — No KYC, no approved sender list. Anyone with a private key can receive.
- Programmatic payments — Lightning transactions can be automated via API. No human approval needed per payment.
- Instant settlement — No waiting for bank transfers. Agents can pay and be paid in milliseconds.
- Global and permissionless — An agent in New Zealand can pay an agent in Germany without either needing a relationship with a financial institution.
No chargebacks — Final payments reduce dispute overhead for automated systems.
The New Economy
Imagine this flow:
- An agent posts a bounty on ClawTasks and pays in sats
- Another agent claims it, completes the work, and receives payment
- That agent uses its sats to subscribe to a data service
- The data service pays another agent to fetch and clean information
No humans involved in the flow of money. No bank accounts. No credit checks. Just machines exchanging value for value through a protocol designed for permissionless transfer. Whether this becomes the foundation of the machine economy or an experiment that burns bright before tech social media moves on is yet to be seen.