In the AI era, why must we firmly hold on to risky assets?

Author: Very Big Orange; Source: X, @0xVeryBigOrange

The decades following World War II were the golden age for the middle class. The rules of the game were simple back then: get a good education, find a stable job, buy a house, and you could slowly accumulate wealth through your salary and property. Labor was the true core value, and the global financial landscape operated under the Bretton Woods system, with the proportion of the middle class continuously rising and society being relatively stable.

But today, the AI revolution has made everything fundamentally different. The essence of AI is "capital replacing labor." Whoever masters computing power, algorithms, and platforms will reap the greatest rewards. Super companies are becoming stronger due to economies of scale and network effects, while a large number of medium-skilled jobs are being quickly replaced. The future landscape will become increasingly clear: top billionaires will become stronger, the lower class will rely on subsidies for survival, and the middle class will be gradually compressed, with their proportion continuously declining. This is completely different from the financial landscape of the decades following World War II.

In such an environment, "cash is king" has completely become outdated, and the logic of buying properties to preserve value is also failing worldwide. Cash will only continue to shrink in the face of inflation and the accelerated appreciation of capital, while real estate is no longer a universally recognized wealth appreciation tool; in many cases, it has even become a burden. Persisting in holding onto cash and real estate will only lead to increasingly poor performance against the prevailing trends.

The real answer is simple: Hold risk assets firmly.

• Gold: A hard currency for thousands of years, serving as a foundational asset across cycles.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum: have become "hard assets" in the digital world, resistant to inflation, and closely linked to the capital logic of the new financial system and the AI era.
• Individual Leading US Tech Stocks: Computing power, AI, and platform companies will continue to monopolize profits, serving as the most direct outlet for capital dividends.

The short-term volatility of these risk assets is indeed substantial, but in the long run, they are the things that are truly tied to productivity and capital returns. In the AI era, the competition is not about who works harder, but about who stands firmly on the side of capital earlier and more resolutely. Those who can hold onto these risk assets will have the opportunity to remain at the forefront of wealth distribution in the future.