Devastating! The advertising era is being ended by AI itself, and a code sealed away for 28 years is about to trigger the next round of wealth redistribution!

Brothers, wake up! Stop obsessing over the fluctuations on the K-line chart every day. The real nuclear bomb has already exploded; the shockwave just hasn’t reached your account yet. What nuclear bomb? It’s that ChatGPT we use every day, along with the increasingly intelligent AI agents behind it. They are doing something revolutionary—disrupting the old rules—by directly smashing the printing press of the internet, which is advertising!

How crazy is this? Let me explain.

Think about how we’ve been using the internet for over twenty years. Free news, free searches, free videos—how do platforms make money? By bombarding you with ads! You get distracted, platforms profit—this logic is perfectly normal. Google became a trillion-dollar giant relying on this, turning the internet into a free, open resource for the whole world.

But now, AI is here.

This thing doesn’t look at ads! If you ask GPT-4 for a coding answer on Stack Overflow, it summarizes the key points for you directly. The ads on the side? It doesn’t even glance at them. As a result, when GPT-4 launched, Stack Overflow’s traffic plummeted by 75%! Tech media outlets that rely on traffic saw a 60% drop. This is just the beginning, brothers. This is only the earliest wave of tech-savvy users trying out AI. Once AI becomes as common as smartphones, all ad-supported websites will have to shake in their boots.

Isn’t it ironic? Ads built the open internet, and the massive data feeding the big models is what made AI possible. Now, the big models are turning around and smashing the ad business.

This is called a cycle—karma.

But here’s the problem: if ads die, where does the money come from? What will the new printing press look like?

The answer might be hidden in a code written 28 years ago by some internet pioneers: “402.” What does this code mean? It means “Please pay first.” But back then, this idea was too advanced—digital payments were a mess, credit card fees exceeded transaction amounts, who would use it? So “402” was shelved and became a museum relic.

Until now.

With blockchain and stablecoins, single transaction fees are less than a cent, and the high costs of small payments are gone. So, two powerful players—Coinbase and Tempo—created the x402 protocol and mpp protocol. What does this mean? It’s a universal “pay” language for AI agents.

Imagine this: in the future, your AI assistant won’t just be a chat buddy. It will be a super worker with a digital wallet. You wake up, and while you’re on the toilet, you tell it: “If the packaging supplier’s price increases by more than 10%, find me three local replacements, request samples, negotiate prices, and swap them out.”

By the time you’re done, it might have already handled everything.

The entire process doesn’t require your company’s procurement team to do bidding or price comparisons, nor does it need your tech team to integrate APIs. All it needs is for your AI account to have funds and to be connected to this open payment protocol. No negotiations, no whitelist approvals—just like connecting to Wi-Fi on your phone.

That’s real disruption.

Compared to this, the built-in checkout feature of ChatGPT is just a little brother. It’s like the old AOL—an enclosed garden. Want to sell stuff there? Fine, prepare your five-year plan, financial statements, user base, and negotiate with OpenAI’s business team. That’s the game for big corporations.

But open protocols are for the little guys, startups, even garage hackers. It’s like the HTTP protocol back in the day—no gatekeepers, anyone can join. Innovation always comes from the edges, then overturns the center. History has proven this once; this time, it will be even more intense.

Facebook, TikTok—spend thousands of engineers earning millions a year just to build anti-scraping defenses and protect their data walls. Now, AI agents can mimic real humans, easily bypassing all protections. No matter how high your wall is, can it stop an enemy that can fly a plane?

It can’t.

So, in the next decade, we’ll see all kinds of flashy “protection schemes” to attract venture capital, but they’re basically just adding ABS to a horse-drawn carriage—useless. The times have changed, folks.

Now, some service providers are already listing their services on sites like x402scan.com. It’s like opening a shop in the AI world—any connected AI can come buy, pay automatically, and everyone benefits.

Back in 1997, no one understood why servers should respond to strangers for free. The open protocol + ads solved that problem, ushering in the digital age.

By 2026 (or even sooner), the ad-based temporary solution will be over.

The open protocol + that long-forgotten “402” status code will take over everything.

You ask, what does this have to do with crypto? It’s a lot! This new economic infrastructure is built on blockchain and stablecoins. What does that mean? It means encrypted assets will truly penetrate the “capillaries of global commerce,” no longer just speculative assets. This narrative is a hundred times bigger than ETFs or halving events.

Still worried about today’s price swings?

Look further ahead, brothers. The old wealth map is failing, and a new one is being quietly drawn by a line of ancient code and countless AI. This time, don’t fall behind.

(After writing late into the night, I looked out the window and felt that in those lit office buildings, many people’s jobs are already sounding the first alarm. Maybe we’re standing on the edge of a new job market.)