02-25-2025 
The death of 9-to-5 and the rise of micropayment economy
25 February, 2025
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Directly preceding the 9/11 era, I was early in my high school years.
Living in Chicagoland, my memories are punctuated by Bulls championships, bleak winters, seeing John Cusack and a young Jack Black filming High Fidelity in Wicker Park when it was becoming the center of hipster music culture. Live from Chicago, Oprah was the biggest name on earth, Mancow Muller helped turn me into an alternative rock libertarian while Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and Amy Poehler were still doing $10 shows on the Second City stage, which I was happy to hit up for date nights on my shoestring budget. Smashing Pumpkins were releasing their biggest hits, Cabrini-Green was on its way out, and Richard Daly’s dynastic reign was at the peak of its heavy-handedness in a way that only the South Side Irish can properly explain…
IYKYK:
Being heavily steeped in the culture of the day, the big movie that really impacted my view on becoming an adult: Fight Club painted a bleak portrait of the dull, meaningless existence of working a “normal” job—the sterile cubicles, the empty small talk, the consumerist treadmill—these were the existential crises of late ’90s and early 2000s America.
The movie was excellent but instantly ended my teenage love affair with the splendor of 90’s Chicago romanticism and surviving on a common path that my elders and peers had been living for a few generations. These glimpses into the culture of work immediately pivoted me out of music and art, and strongly into focus on the culture, politics, and business, as well as the martial arts!
Now, decades later, I have done well for myself. I am a business owner, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and a very capable contractor to several clients. But the problems these films illustrated about the common man and our collective work culture have only compounded.
The work is more meaningless, consumerism more pervasive, and—perhaps most crushing of all—the pay has remained largely stagnant. But it’s not just a purchasing power issue (although the dollar has lost significant value over this timeframe). It’s an existential one: the traditional job, the stable career, the idea of climbing the corporate ladder toward financial security is, for many, already dead.
The rise of the gig economy
The gig economy’s emergence was not a fluke. It is not a passing phase. It’s the inevitable trajectory of work in an increasingly distributed, digital world.
Uber (NASDAQ: UBER) epitomized the shift by stripping away all pretense that workers are anything more than disposable contractors. No benefits, no culture, no long-term investment in people—just an algorithm dispatching you when you’re needed and ghosting you when you’re not. A job reduced to its purest economic function: you get paid for the real work you do, and if you’re not working, you don’t get paid.
But it won’t stop with drivers. We are already seeing the Uberization of knowledge work—consultants, managers, project leads—roles that used to come with the implied safety net of salary and benefits are now being broken down into task-based contracts. Work will continue to balkanize and decentralize, and startups will keep carving off smaller and smaller chunks of specialization where gig workers can bid for tasks, complete them, and move on.
But there is still a problem with profitability because somehow wages have gone down, and so have profits.
And this is where micropayments come in.
The financial system isn’t ready for the future of work
The existing financial infrastructure isn’t built for this world. The idea of a paycheck—weekly or biweekly payments for aggregated labor—was designed for the industrial age. But if the way people work is changing, why should the way they get paid stay the same?
The gig economy doesn’t function on a set schedule. Someone might have three productive hours on Monday, five on Tuesday, and fifteen minutes on Wednesday. The inefficiencies of weekly payments become glaring in this landscape, and this is part of the reason companies like Uber and Instacart (NASDAQ: CART) can’t make money even while bidding down the cost of labor for their contractors.
Why should a contractor working on micro-projects have to wait a week or more to be paid when their work is already done? Why should the company be paying fees to obsolete banks and payments companies?
They shouldn’t.
Workers should be paid as they produce, in real-time, without the need for costly intermediaries skimming off transaction fees and slowing everything down. This is where Bitcoin’s original design shines.
The micropayment economy
Integrated micropayments are the missing financial layer for the decentralized, gig-based economy. Instead of working for a lump sum paid out later, workers could be paid instantly for each segment of their labor. Finished a five-minute task? Payment should be settled immediately. Contributed a valuable insight to a company’s decision-making process? The market should compensate you accordingly, without waiting for payroll cycles, payroll companies, etc.
This extends beyond just labor. Content creators, analysts, software developers—anyone contributing value in real-time should be able to monetize their work as they go. The idea of waiting for ad revenue payouts, affiliate commissions, or aggregated consulting fees is antiquated and costly.
A world powered by micropayments allows workers to get paid as fluidly as they create value.
This is also why the future of work demands bitcoin-integrated incentives. Workers should also be earning tokenized equity in the businesses they contribute to, aligning their long-term interests with the company’s success. Imagine being able to stake a portion of your earnings into company shares or earning governance tokens that influence strategic decisions in your workplace. The economic incentives become immediate and transparent, and they help fill the gaps in everyone’s wealth that the gig economy has created to date.
AI and LLM Agents will accelerate this shift
The devaluation of “busy work” is already well underway, but the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and LLM agents will accelerate it at an unprecedented rate.
Large language models (LLMs) are automating tasks that once filled up entire workweeks—summarizing reports, generating basic marketing materials, coding repetitive functions, and answering customer service inquiries. The kind of work that padded 20 hours of real productivity into 40-hour weeks in offices worldwide is being stripped away, revealing just how much of the traditional workweek was built on low-value, time-filling tasks.
This will only exacerbate the transition to gig-based, results-driven work. If AI can handle 70% of a job function, companies won’t keep paying someone for the remaining 30% as a salaried employee. Instead, they’ll hire specialists on a per-task basis, paying only for the work that genuinely requires human input.
This shift—where workers bid for small, specialized tasks rather than holding full-time positions—demands an efficient payment system that can handle high-frequency, low-value transactions. Traditional banking and payment processors aren’t built for this level of frictionless commerce.
Again, Bitcoin, with scalable micropayments, is.
Why we need BSV, tokens, Teranode, and MNEE stablecoins
To make this vision a reality, we need a Bitcoin network that scales. The one-megabyte block size on BTC is laughably inadequate for handling global microtransactions, Lightning Network is little more than a meme, and the other blockchains are focused on immature gambling instead of real-world utility.
If we want to move beyond theoretical discussions and actually empower gig workers, creators, and micro-entrepreneurs, we need BSV adoption rapidly.
We need these things adopted ASAP:
- Teranode to handle enterprise-level transaction volume at near-zero fees.
- 1Sat Ordinals to create a dynamic, tokenized economy of digital assets that can represent everything from micro-equity, ID/auth systems and work credits.
- MNEE stablecoins to ensure seamless, stable-value transactions without volatility concerns, most workers will prefer stablecoins for their liquid cash.
- BSV as the underlying stable, scarce asset (digital gold? “gigital” oil?) for their longer-term portfolio and fuel for their own entrepreneurial activities.
All of this needs to be integrated fast. The way people work has already changed, and financial tools are lagging behind. If we fail to bridge this gap, the inefficiencies of the current system will continue to strangle economic opportunity for workers and for the companies that source and distribute the gigs.
The new reality
The 9-to-5 job isn’t coming back. The corporate safety nets, the implied loyalty between employer and employee, the notion of climbing a career ladder—they’re artifacts of a fading economic order.
In the Trump era, we are also seeing an end to the inefficiencies of entitlement programs, welfare, and other aspects of the implied “safety net.”
Fight Club ends in sadness, empty platitudes, and half-hopes from broken characters watching the world burn. This is not the world we are going to live in.
The future belongs to micro-entrepreneurs: people who get paid in real-time, in borderless micropayments, for the value they create in an increasingly decentralized work environment. It will be a world of extreme ownership, personal responsibility, and unbounded economic freedom.
This is our market.
This is our mission.
And we need to move fast.
Watch: Micropayments are what are going to allow people to trust AI
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