Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

Over the last decade, two seismic waves have taken shape in the digital realm. On one hand, we have the cryptocurrency movement, championed by Bitcoin and its ideological siblings, seeking to redefine money and power structures. On the other, artificial intelligence (AI)—and especially its recent breakout star, generative AI (GenAI)—is slipping into our everyday lives, reshaping how we work, create, and interact. As Bitcoin edges toward a mythical $100,000 valuation, and AI quietly proliferates, a fascinating contrast emerges: Are we witnessing the technological upheaval crypto once promised, or are we seeing existing institutions reinforced by the subtle genius of AI? Bitcoin’s Institutional Crown—and Limited Utility For years, Bitcoin has been heralded as digital gold, a hedge against uncertainty and the ultimate “people’s money.” If it hits $100K, it will symbolically confirm its acceptance by the very institutions it once aimed to circumvent. Big players—banks, asset managers, and ...

As it is with all technological change, every industry must understand, assess, and prepare to incorporate the “new” with the existing. The payment industry, which is undergoing almost constant change, is no exception to this rule. But to understand this change, we must start at the beginning – with Web 1.0 or the “static web”, so called because you would load all the data at once from a web server. This would start to change at around the turn of the millennia with Web 2.0. In 1999, Microsoft experimented with what later would be called “AJAX” (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) , which was an enhancement to its web browser so that it could asynchronously pull data from the web server without refreshing the whole page. This enabled websites to become more interactive and behave more and more like applications.  It was this underlying technology together with Javascript frameworks that enormously simplified content creation and self-publishing, and ultimately gave rise to social medi...