Editor | PANEWS et al.

Recently, Cobo co-founder God Fish conducted an in-depth conversation with Jin Ming, founder of Jichain Technology, discussing AI, entrepreneurship, investment, Bitcoin, Web3, Agents, and life missions.

God Fish is an early participant in the cryptocurrency industry, having engaged in the field since 2011, and is one of the earliest Bitcoin evangelists and participants in China; Jin Ming is a member of China's national freediving team and the founder of Jichain Technology, focusing on the research and commercial application of video AI technology.

The following is an organized interview:

Jin Ming: The last time you participated in an interview was ten years ago, in 2017. At that time, you had a classic line: "With so much money, I suddenly don't know how to spend it."

God Fish: Now I know how to spend it. Essentially, I believe that human will has become increasingly important. After the era of AI has arrived, many things that required a lot of time and costs to accomplish in the past can now be done quickly if you have an idea. This change is significant. We might not have dared to imagine things ten or twenty years ago, but now as long as you have an idea, the execution costs on the backend have dropped significantly, and many things can be delivered quickly. Previously, you had a seed, a dream, but it might have remained just a dream forever. Now, the backend costs are dropping especially fast, and AI has compressed and structured a lot of human knowledge, allowing you to call upon these abilities at low costs. I feel like it has opened up a lot of possibilities.

Jin Ming: Are you satisfied with your current life status? Do you feel happy or content every day?

God Fish: It's okay, but I still feel a bit lost. It's not like when I first started my business, where I had a strong sense of mission. Now, I've entered a chaotic state: you see many possibilities unfolded by AI, and you feel it’s the best era, but you don't see a particularly clear path. Whether it's a sense of mission or a specific business path, I still haven't figured it all out completely. So now, I'm doing more exploration to improve myself.

Jin Ming: When you first started your business, how did you define your sense of mission?

God Fish: Back then, you saw a window of opportunity which generated a very strong creative impulse. You felt that if you didn't do this, you would definitely regret it in your life. It was like a force pushing you, and you couldn't escape it, so you just went out to do it. Actually, it started in 2013, and the core issue was the problem of computing power. Mining originally started in the United States and then began to migrate to China. When China first started making ASIC miners, the machines still needed to connect to American mining pools to mine. There were two problems here: first is the network issue, the international internet had delays and packet loss, leading to poor mining efficiency; second is that the entire settlement method of the mining industry at that time was unreasonable. So what we did was solve these two problems. Essentially, you saw a market gap, a niche market, with some unmet demands and you just happened to have the ability to meet it. A very strong impulse to build it emerged at that moment.

Jin Ming: After so much time, what do you think your mission is now?

God Fish: I still feel the need to create something. I always define myself as a Builder. Since the era of AI, I have created quite a few small tools and dashboards, but I still haven't found something truly large and systematic. I’m still observing. In fact, after starting a business, being on the front lines and having done many things can lead to a lot of confusion and bewilderment. So you have to enrich a lot of knowledge from human history: how did similar things happen in the past? How did philosophers think? These things will come back to influence you. At this moment, you can see a lot of future possibilities unfold, but you still haven't found that specific path.

Jin Ming: Yesterday when I shared, I talked about purpose awareness, which is the sense of life purpose. I compared it to a balance scale. Many people at first want to create some big things, hoping to leave a legacy; while on the other side of the scale is experience and happiness. If placed on this scale, where do you feel you are now?

God Fish: I'm neither particularly eager to leave something behind nor particularly pursuing experiences. I’ve also analyzed many psychological aspects with AI, but essentially, I’m someone who has an inner urge to build. I just want to build something. When something is created, I feel very satisfied. I want to present some things because I believe that, in a certain sense, living means your existence adds a little more possibility to the world.

Jin Ming: A potential psychological characteristic of a Builder is being prone to anxiety. Because your life purpose is to keep building. When you're not actively moving forward and building, it's easy to enter an anxious state. Have you experienced this state? How do you usually solve it?

God Fish: Definitely to some extent, but I can switch now. Since I was young, I have some ways to empty my mind, like raising animals and engaging in hobbies. So basically, I enter this state every week. You have to allow yourself to empty your mind.

Jin Ming: What channels do you currently use to collect information daily?

God Fish: Almost all of it is AI. I open my eyes, and AI tells me what it read from everything I did yesterday. Now I have three AI Agents. One Agent is oriented towards tool rationality, it tells you what you should do; one is more feminine and soft, seeking what is deep inside you; another combines what you did yesterday and tells you what blind spots it has observed. For example, it might tell you: there is a good book in history, a certain chapter discusses issues that ancient people also faced, and it resonates well with your current state. Would you like to spend 15 minutes to read that chapter? Then three things will pop up, and you can directly check them out.

Additionally, I have a note-taking system. They will use evolutionary thinking to relate things I have focused on in the past and those relevant to my life. In a sense, my attention is like a "god," deciding which viewpoints or propositions can survive. Every day, AI "hybridizes" a batch of new things and then screens one to tell me: there’s an article you might read. So now I hardly read things directly. There will also be some daily reports and long articles filtered by AI, which are processed by AI first and then shown to me. I usually quickly compress them into a PPT to review.

Jin Ming: But this method is more about processing existing information. There’s a lot of information that happens in real-time, and obtaining this kind of information through AI may not be as timely.

God Fish: I feel indifferent about that. The most important information will find you; you will definitely see it. I also don't make very short-term trades. I realized a long time ago that I have no talent for that. Making some simple decisions is relatively easy, but for longer-term matters, I may be more suitable.

My real start in investment actually came after I finished playing with DeFi. DeFi essentially helped me complete my investment history. We saw how traditional finance was invented from the "underground Federal Reserve," and reviewed the development process over the past 200 years. In that process, a lot of questions arise, and then you go and supplement your history, supplement your financial knowledge. It was at this point that I began to seriously invest.

I was just fortunate on day one to unknowingly come across some decent methodologies and walked a path that wasn't too wrong. But it was only after completing that wave of DeFi that I began to establish my own knowledge structure and investment framework. Before that, I didn’t actually have a complete investment framework. Back then, I didn’t even think of myself as doing investment, just had a vague intuition that I should hold some Bitcoin while integrating a little position management thinking.

I am an ISTJ personality, and many frameworks are abstracted from practical experience. I formed some frameworks first, trained my intuition; during the process, many new questions arose, which further abstracted new frameworks. The investment framework is gradually formed this way.

Jin Ming: Generally, very few people form investment frameworks from DeFi. Because DeFi, in essence, often involves "digging and selling," which is completely different from investment logic.

God Fish: But what you need to look at is what functions these financial products themselves are actually providing and how they meet market demands. They are essentially building a financial market on-chain from 0 to 1. I’m looking at this process, not just that we do arbitrage and mining in DeFi; I think those are more like muscle memory, intuitive things. But in this process, you accumulate a lot of experience, which is very valuable; at the same time, you also accumulate a lot of questions, which are equally valuable. You might not know why people need these things at first, but after figuring it out, and looking at history, many things will connect together.

Jin Ming: So this round of RWA landing on-chain, including the introduction of US stocks on-chain, is equivalent to extending your understanding of financial products formed in DeFi to traditional finance.

God Fish: Yes, it’s like they are putting US stocks in front of you, and you have to understand the logic behind US stocks. Ten years ago when I was mining, others even borrowed money from me to speculate on US stocks, and I didn’t really understand it then. I can only say I was lucky enough to walk a relatively correct path. Back then, it was quite ignorant; I hadn't thought it through. Later, many questions arose, and coincidentally, AI came along, making the speed of learning much faster, allowing me to quickly go through many books and materials to understand why these things happened.

Jin Ming: You have been in contact with Bitcoin for over ten years now. How has your view on BTC changed?

God Fish: No change; it’s still digital gold. In this world, the assets you can hold without intermediaries are very few; otherwise, assets are basically layered with one, two, or even three levels of intermediaries. The value of BTC is precisely revealed in extreme situations. So it’s normal for people not to care about it when the market is booming. Good assets don’t need narratives, and as time goes by, they can prove certain things even more.

Jin Ming: Do you agree with the view that BTC significantly enhances the capability of sovereign individuals under classical liberalism?

God Fish: One core aspect of sovereign individuals is the ability to manage assets. AI brings enhanced capability, while BTC is a core asset in the means of asset management for sovereign individuals. These two elements are very important.

Jin Ming: Some of my friends, who were very invested in BTC early on and had strong faith, seem to start feeling that there’s no new narrative after this cycle ends.

God Fish: Good assets do not need narratives.

Jin Ming: I think the two important narratives in this round of Web3 may be the full asset arbitrage by Ethena and the RWA on-chain. But both of these are still in the early stages. I feel that there hasn’t been a blockbuster ToC application that has truly emerged in Web3 yet.

God Fish: I have had a viewpoint for a long time that ecosystems like Ethereum may not be used by humans in the future, but by Agents. It will ultimately be a type of network, and humans might not be the most suitable end users. The current requirements for user expertise and security awareness for on-chain products are often too high. If humans become the end users directly, the threshold is still quite high. But if Agents become the intermediary layer, it may present a better method. I am currently observing one point: can Agents achieve large-scale adoption within an ecosystem like Ethereum? If this point really arrives, it could be a turning point.

Jin Ming: I believe that a value of Web3 has been significantly underestimated. From 1.0, 2.0 to 3.0, "readable, writable, and ownable," it may fundamentally change the way wealth distribution works in society. One core value of Web3 is that participants can simultaneously be the owners of interests. You are both a participant and a shareholder.

God Fish: I think this will appear in the future. For example, data in the AI era could potentially generate similar mechanisms. The possibility of technological diffusion has already opened up. When it can be adopted on a large scale may still need to resolve many issues and require time. But the possibilities are already there. We are already seeing successful demos in some edge cases, but large-scale applications have not yet been formed.

Jin Ming: What is your view on gold?

God Fish: I don't pay much attention to those. Bitcoin is better gold.

Jin Ming: The common point between the two is consensus, but the groups forming this consensus are different. Bitcoin forms a consensus on the sovereign individual level, while gold forms a stronger consensus at the level of sovereign nations, especially central banks.

God Fish: Essentially, it can be divided into two factions. One faction is represented by Bitcoin, “digital currency + AI,” while the other faction involves traditional "gold + industrial manufacturing capabilities." If viewed on a spectrum, we might lean a bit towards the left.

Jin Ming: If you want to enjoy the so-called "free lunch" of financial markets and achieve well-diversified investments, you should hold more assets that are lowly correlated or even negatively correlated. What do you think?

God Fish: I don't think there truly exist so-called negatively correlated assets. Many assets are indeed diversified and have low correlation under normal circumstances, but they always share some core constraints. When those core market variables undergo systematic changes, and the entire market enters extreme situations, basically all assets will behave similarly. So I believe what you really need to withstand are the most extreme situations. Many times, you may think two assets are negatively correlated, but at the most extreme times, it might not truly protect you. Therefore, I’m not particularly a typical diversification advocate, but rather a concentrated one. Because you can’t understand so many things, and human energy is also limited. Since the underlying logic has not been completely understood, I would rather concentrate my assets on a few things that I can truly grasp.

Jin Ming: Some things actually don't require you to fully understand. For example, gold, even if you don't research it, it already forms a long-term consensus in many sovereign central banks.

God Fish: But it affects your mindset when it drops. So don’t let these things influence your mentality; the simplest way is not to hold them. If Bitcoin drops, you won’t panic, and you won’t experience much volatility in your mindset. But the prerequisite is that you must have faith. And to truly possess this faith, you need to complete a lot of preparatory work.

Jin Ming: Ultimately, those who truly excel will surely develop a core that belongs to themselves and fits their own strategies.

God Fish: This ties back to the trading lifestyle. Your personality preferences will affect your choice of investment philosophy and framework; which will ultimately influence your position management and mindset management. Our thought process can be roughly divided into three layers. First, we might discover an anomaly: this company seems a bit strange. We won't start with a heavy position; we might not buy more than 2%, or even normally just a fraction, as an observation position. Then we spend time and energy to research it thoroughly. If we feel its logic is right, we might upgrade once more from tiny allocations to single-digit assets, but generally won't exceed 10%.

Transitioning from around 10% to around 20% for core assets actually requires going through a leap of "faith." Because once you truly enter core positions, it's not just relying on fundamentals and logical reasoning but also needs to have something akin to faith. You need to see a sufficiently big vision that can support a huge TAM while also having very good business logic and real key bottlenecks. So to sum up, our current core framework is: monopoly + growth. The most essential assets must have a particularly large TAM and require a sufficiently big vision to guide them. Otherwise, it won’t be able to fit into the core asset allocation.

Jin Ming: Based on your framework, what do you think the most core assets are right now?

God Fish: Currently, the main assets we've included are Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tesla. SpaceX is still in the timing and observation phase and hasn't been upgraded yet. Ethereum is still included, but we're also discussing whether to downgrade Ethereum from this layer. Because the core logic we see is that Agents may run on Ethereum in the future. Of course, this logic has not yet been disproven.

Jin Ming: But why can't Agents run on Base? Why can't they run on Solana?

God Fish: They all can. But the ecosystem of Ethereum may match better. There is still a lot of decentralized infrastructure at the bottom. Although during the past period, these things may not have truly been realized, the foundation is also trying to push in this direction. For example, registering and building ecological infrastructure around Agents, etc. Although there hasn't been something particularly large that has emerged yet, at least some work has been done, giving the market a bit of hope.