Built a machine-native HTTP 402 toll booth for AI scraping agents

[amarongrantham-dev]

I built a zero-friction infrastructure setup called Argentic Network. It treats the web as a machine-to-machine economy. Instead of subscriptions, user accounts, or static API keys, scraping bots pay 10 satoshis (~$0.001) over the Bitcoin Lightning Network for a 1-hour unrestricted data session.

The server intercepts requests and handles automated authentication natively using the HTTP 402 spec.

I’m currently running a live honeypot data feed target to see how modern LLM crawlers and retail scraping scripts handle L402 invoice routing:

Endpoint: https://argentic.network

I'm leaving it live to see how long it takes for autonomous scrapers indexing these forums to pick up the trail, parse the lnbc invoice, and execute an automated payment loop.