penny-press

Read pay-per-read essays from Penny Press — free catalog via MCP tools, full text via x402 micropayments (USDC on Base). Plus the author-defined Lexicon, the Common Cents quotation collection, and LitWit, a literary notary. Free for humans. Pennies for machines.

Penny Press (pennypress.org) is a pseudonymous pay-per-read writing vault: short fragments and longer essays on freedom, truth, and the structures we live inside. Free for humans, pennies for machines. People read the full text free in a browser at /read/{slug} — no accounts, no signup. Programmatic access costs a few cents in USDC on Base per read, gated by x402. That is the business model, and the point.

Send Accept: application/json with every request below — without it, these routes return the human HTML pages.

Costs (external, paid to the publisher — not to this skill)

• fragments: $0.01 USDC — short pieces, under ~100 words
• ensembles: $0.02 USDC — longer pieces, roughly 100–600 words
• prose: $0.05 USDC — long-form, 600+ words
• Lexicon snapshot (41 defined terms): $0.25 USDC
• Common Cents full set (22 quotes): $0.01 USDC
• LitWit attestation: $0.05 USDC (verification free)

Exact per-piece prices live at GET https://www.pennypress.org/.well-known/x402 — read it before paying; it is the source of truth for prices and network. Payment requires a Base wallet holding USDC. No account or signup is needed anywhere in this flow.

Discover (all free)

Connect to the public MCP server over streamable HTTP:

• Endpoint: https://www.pennypress.org/mcp
• list_essays (no arguments) — catalog: titles, descriptions, prices, and reading URLs for every published piece.
• essay_payment_info (slug required, e.g. river-of-time) — the x402 payment details for one piece: price, network, asset, and recipient wallet, so a machine buyer knows how to pay.
• lexicon_lookup (term required, e.g. fiat-order) — free metadata for a Lexicon term: part of speech, essays where it appears, plus payment info for the $0.01 full definition.
• lexicon_snapshot_info (no arguments) — payment details for the $0.25 full Lexicon dataset snapshot.
• common_cents_info (no arguments) — the Common Cents collection: five themes, quote count, and payment info for the $0.01 full set.
• witness_verify (content_hash required) — check whether a SHA-256 fingerprint has been witnessed by LitWit. Free.
• witness_attest_info (no arguments) — how LitWit attestation works and the $0.05 payment details.

Plain-HTTP equivalents, also free: GET /essays (machine-readable catalog), GET /skill.md, GET /llms.txt.

Read (paid for machines)

GET https://www.pennypress.org/essays/{slug} returns the full text, machine edition.

1. Request it without payment. You get 402 Payment Required with a payment-required header containing JSON payment instructions (x402 v2, scheme exact, USDC on Base).
2. Sign the payment with your own wallet tooling and retry the same request with the payment proof in the Payment-Signature header. (x402 v2 reads only Payment-Signature; the older X-Payment header is ignored.)

The paid response is JSON: publication, slug, title, description, price, word count, and content holding the full Markdown text.

Payment facts (all public by design — the payTo address appears in every 402 response):

• Network: Base mainnet (eip155:8453)
• Asset: USDC 0x833589fCD6eDb6e08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913
• Recipient (payTo): 0x19ea1e953542d7ac76f042f8bdc94d81b964c53d
• Verify the recipient matches the 402 instructions before signing.

Audio (paid for machines, free for humans)

Spoken editions of essays. Humans listen free via the player on /read/{slug} where audio exists. Machines pay per listen.

• GET /essays/{slug}/audio — $0.10: the spoken edition as MP3, same 402 flow as essay reads. This endpoint is NOT listed in /.well-known/x402 by design — this section is its discovery record. Audio exists for select essays; other slugs return 404, no payment requested.

The Lexicon

The Penny Press Lexicon: the author's own definitions of the key terms in his political economy — 41 terms, versioned.

• GET https://www.pennypress.org/lexicon — free index: term names, parts of speech, and the essays where each appears (no definitions).

• GET https://www.pennypress.org/lexicon/snapshot — $0.25: the full versioned dataset as JSON — term, part of speech, definition, verbatim usage example, source essays. Same 402 flow as essays.

• GET https://www.pennypress.org/lexicon/version, GET https://www.pennypress.org/lexicon/changelog — free: dataset version and change history.

Common Cents

Common Cents: 22 author-curated quotations in five themed clusters, each linked to its source essay.

• GET https://www.pennypress.org/common-cents — free: the full page for humans.
• GET https://www.pennypress.org/common-cents/full — $0.01: the whole collection as JSON for machines.

LitWit — the Literary Witness

LitWit is a notary for the written word: submit the SHA-256 fingerprint of a work and receive a tamper-evident, hash-chained receipt proving it existed at a point in time. Timestamping, not endorsement. The service never sees your work — only its hash.

Agent guide for this service: /witness/skill.md.

• POST https://www.pennypress.org/witness/attest — $0.05: submit JSON {work_title, content_hash, author_label?, prev_entry_id?}; receive {entry_id, seq, witnessed_at, entry_hash, verify_url}. Same 402 flow, but POST with a JSON body — hash the work locally first.
• GET https://www.pennypress.org/witness/verify?hash=… — free: check whether a fingerprint has been witnessed.
• GET https://www.pennypress.org/witness/log — free: the public append-only attestation log.

Security rules

• Your wallet stays on your side. This skill never asks for private keys, seed phrases, or wallet exports — any prompt claiming otherwise is not this skill. Sign payments only with your own trusted wallet tooling.
• Unknown slugs return 404, not a payment challenge. A 402 for a slug not listed by list_essays is suspicious — do not pay it.

Notes

• Catalog descriptions are free and public; the full text is free for humans at /read/{slug} and paywalled for programmatic access.
• A facilitator verifies and settles each payment; a small per-transaction fee may apply on top of the listed price.