Payment Links as Economic Identity for Autonomous Agents: Non-Custodial, Dollar-Denominated Machine Payments on Bitcoin

Autonomous software agents can already pay for resources on the internet through HTTP 402 protocols such as L402 and x402. They still lack three properties needed for a functioning machine economy: a persistent, human-readable address at which they can be paid; prices denominated in a stable unit of account; and settlement that no single custodian or issuer-run network can halt. This paper proposes that a payment link of the form satolink.com/@name can serve as an agent’s economic identity, resolving to fresh Lightning Network invoices that settle either in bitcoin or in USDT issued on Bitcoin, with keys held by the agent’s operator rather than by a platform. The proposal combines three ideas that prior work treats separately: identity for receiving, non-custodial dollar settlement on Bitcoin, and a single address space shared by humans and machines. I describe the architecture, formalise a spending policy for agent wallets, state a threat model, and set out six research questions with an experimental plan on a live mainnet deployment.