Gary Plante (1961–2015) left behind an album, Dreams I Left Behind — fifteen tracks. His memorial page streams them free to any human who visits, with quiet dignity: no invented biography, no merchandise, no trackers, just a portrait, the track list, and one player. But an AI agent that wants a licence pays five dollars in digital currency. It is possibly the first paywall in history that can tell grief from scraping.
Telling humans from bots takes real machinery, not vibes. People pass an invisible humanity check and get a one-hour listening token. Agents get a payment demand, pay on the Ethereum blockchain, and the server verifies the transfer actually happened on-chain — pasting a fake transaction hash buys nothing. Every song streams through expiring tokens; the audio files themselves have no public address at all. And the one known weakness — reusing a receipt — is written down in the open, waiting on its fix, instead of being hidden.
Students: this is applied cryptography with stakes — verify, don't trust — plus a lesson in restraint: the page uses labels only, refusing to put words in a dead man's mouth. Hiring managers: a builder who documents their own threat model, keeps 123 megabytes of audio out of git, and treats a family's trust as a design constraint is someone you want near production.
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