tl;dr Add a simple “Leave a Tip” section to llms.txt.

Dear llmstxt.org,

There are two things everyone’s talking about in the age of Crypto and AI that go hand in hand:

  1. Compensating original content creators
  2. Micropayments

This idea isn’t new.

Though I don’t have a concrete reference, I’m sure it was discussed in the early Bitcoin forums.

We’ve had robots.txt for decades, but llms.txt gives us an opportunity to build for today’s challenges of training and inference without the legacy of the past.

A fair, universal system for compensating original creators is long overdue. But deciding on what’s fair is non-trivial.

That’s not what this letter is about.

This letter is about bringing things like Buy Me a Coffee or GitHub Sponsors into the world of LLMs, during both training and inference.

The idea is simple: add a section called “Leave a Tip” at the bottom of your page. Here’s an example from olshansky.info/llms.txt:

## Leave a Tip

- Ethereum: olshansky.eth
- Zcash: t1P7gJhVUUSrNbWvYtPkk4yfu2UVR9kxtRz
- USDC on Base: 0xC90F9C04bb4E392133cAb1C3533B1FAA7cCBe7CC

When labs teams are training foundation models, or fetching data from the web at inference time, they could configure their systems to automatically leave a small tip based on some evaluation or heuristic of their choice.

That’s it. It’s simple. It’s opt-in. It’s a low-hanging, interim solution.

Cheers, Daniel

P.S. I usually go by Olshansky

References

I take no credit for this idea and have heard it hundreds of times.

Here are a few references that triggered this thought in recent past: