In the Web2 era, to "buy" meant participating in a digital transaction facilitated by a trusted, centralized intermediary. When you bought a product on Amazon, a song on iTunes, or a service online, the action was an agreement between you and a platform. Ownership was often more akin to a license, recorded in a company's private database and paid for with government-issued currency through established financial systems like credit cards or PayPal. The process was a digital version of a traditional retail experience, defined by convenience and access but ultimately controlled by the platform. From a Web3 and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) perspective, the act of "buying" evolves into a fundamentally different concept centered on verifiable ownership and automated exchange. To "buy" is now to execute a peer-to-peer transaction on a blockchain, often using cryptocurrency, where a smart contract automatically transfers ownership of a unique digital or physical asset without an intermediary. This could mean acquiring an NFT that represents art or a concert ticket, purchasing tokens that grant you a vote in a decentralized organization (DAO), or even enabling an IoT device, like your car, to autonomously buy and pay for its own electricity. In this new paradigm, buying is no longer just a transaction; it's the act of acquiring a programmable, transparently-owned asset recorded on an immutable public ledger. It could also mean in the future a machine-to-machine (M2M) economy where Machines negotiate, detect, and compensate directly, value is encoded within the behavior itself, not layered on afterward, and the human intent becomes a governing semantic law rather than an external rule.