1. The "hedging" prospects of BTC: a final settlement tool, not a short-term safe haven

Yi Lihua's insights are sharp, but one point must be clarified: BTC's "hedging" is fundamentally different from traditional assets' "hedging" logic.

In the short term, it is a "risk asset": during the initial phase of sudden geopolitical or financial crises, the market will fall into a "liquidity panic," and institutions will indiscriminately sell all sellable assets (including BTC and gold) to exchange for cash or government bonds, which usually causes all risk assets to decline simultaneously. Therefore, buying BTC at the moment of crisis may result in buying at the middle of the decline.

In the long term, it is the ultimate tool to hedge "sovereign credit risk": its "hedging" value is realized when the traditional system fails. When fiat currency credit is damaged, the banking system is fragile, and capital controls are imposed, BTC, as a global, censorship-resistant, permissionless settlement network, will have its value re-priced. Recent rumors of Iran considering accepting BTC as a settlement currency for oil trade exemplify this "sovereign-level" hedging application.

Conclusion: do not expect BTC to rise counter to the trend every time the market panics, like gold. The real "hedging" opportunity appears in the late stage of a crisis, when people start questioning and reconstructing the traditional financial system. At this stage, BTC’s unique value as a non-sovereign, hard cap global reserve asset will be fully revealed. The "verification timing" and "allocation opportunity" Yi Lihua mentioned refer precisely to this phase.

2. AI + Web3 entrepreneurial opportunities: reshaping the value layer, not just copying the application layer

The integration of AI and Web3 is not simply about adding AI functions to Web3 applications, but about leveraging their core advantages to jointly address key pain points in both the traditional and blockchain worlds.

Currently, the three most core and promising integration points are:

Decentralized Infrastructure for AI (DePIN for AI): AI development heavily depends on computing power and data. Web3 can aggregate idle GPU resources worldwide—such as personal high-end graphics cards and unused data center capacity—through decentralized computing networks, providing AI developers with lower-cost, censorship-resistant infrastructure. This solves the "power" problem of AI development.

Verifiable AI: AI is a "black box," and its decision-making process is difficult to trust and audit. Web3’s core technologies—Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and verifiable computation—can provide "proofs of reasoning" for AI models. You can verify whether an AI diagnosis, risk control decision, or content was generated by a specific model without exposing its core data and weights. This addresses the "trust" issue of AI, which is crucial for finance, healthcare, and other fields.

Agent Economy: In the future, a large amount of online activity will be carried out by AI agents representing users. Web3 can provide these AI agents with decentralized identities (DID), autonomous payment capabilities (smart contracts), and incentives (tokens). Imagine a swarm of AI agents autonomously collaborating, trading data, completing tasks, and settling automatically on decentralized markets—this will give rise to a new, machine-driven microeconomic system.

Entrepreneurship advice: do not stay at the superficial level of "AI-generated NFTs" or "AI trading bots." The real opportunity lies in using Web3’s technological philosophy and incentive mechanisms to build the more open, trustworthy, and efficient infrastructure necessary for the AI era. This is the true path of Yi Lihua’s "low-cost creation of global products" and the "AI maritime expedition."#Gate广场四月发帖挑战