You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.
Traditional money does have APIs, but they are closed. You can program the merchant API of the VISA network if you are a trusted merchant. You can send and receive FIX messages if you are a stockbroker or exchange. Regular people, however, don’t even have APIs into their bank accounts, let alone the broader economy. Bitcoin changes all that by not only offering an API for accounts (wallets) and transactions, but also making that API available to everyone.This idea, providing an API for something that doesn't have one, is one of the more fascinating to me and a space I expect we'll see lots of activity over the coming years. This, more or less, is what the whole spime/internet of things/industrial internet is about: Giving things that couldn't talk the ability to talk through APIs. Not surprisingly, I'm especially interested in what this means for brands and how they can build out their own APIs. A few years ago I wrote about Starbucks APIs and, in a lot of ways, we think about Percolate as providing a similar interface for brands by codifying it into the system and making it available to consume via API.