At three in the morning, a friend sent me a screenshot of a contract with a full screen of liquidations, captioned 'It's zero again.' This is the third time this month I've received similar news. Looking at the neon lights outside that have not turned off, I reflect on whether the you who initially believed 'holding will lead to financial freedom' is still the same. The crypto world has long since changed—the speed of listing coins on exchanges rivals that of a printing press, and behind the two-month carnival of one million new coins is a meticulously designed 'harvesting assembly line'.
When we are staring at the candlestick charts all night, exchanges, market makers, and project teams are sharing the same 'harvest timetable'. A former operator of a certain exchange once revealed to me that listing coins is no longer about technical screening, but rather 'harvest efficiency evaluation': when community engagement reaches 5,000 people, the first round of selling is initiated, when social media topics exceed 10,000, the second round of dumping is executed, coupled with pinpoint explosions in the contract market, the entire sequence of actions has an error margin of no more than 48 hours. Even more frightening is that some platforms have developed 'emotion harvesting algorithms', which automatically trigger dumping instructions when keywords like 'go all-in' or 'bottom fishing' exceed a certain threshold.
The primary market has become a new stronghold for capital pools. A certain star public chain's audit report from last year indicated that its claimed 'one million TPS' actually had test data of less than 2,000, but this did not prevent the project team from completing a tiered harvest through 18 exchanges within three months. Even more magical is that these air coins often disguise themselves in new concepts like DAO and the metaverse, utilizing KOL matrices for 'cognitive dimensionality reduction': when even a grandma can casually mention Web 3.0, it is a signal light for the project team to close the net.
The frequent regulatory hammer strikes are by no means accidental. The transaction records of a certain investigated exchange show that it has achieved a daily maximum harvest of 2.3 billion yuan through invisible means such as 'contract slippage control' and 'liquidation point correction'. This explains why 94% of retail contract accounts do not survive more than three months—when you think you are gambling against the market, you are actually betting against the platform's capital pool. What is even more alarming is that some platforms have started to build capital pools using models like 'trading mining' and 'locked position dividends', which is essentially a form of a Ponzi scheme.
Facing the impending 'halving narrative', I have to pour a bucket of cold water: historical data shows that on average, 47% of cryptocurrencies go to zero in the six months leading up to each halving. Investors who are hoping for a bull market turnaround in 2025 may not realize that they are falling into a larger cognitive trap—the project teams have long prepared a full set of rhetoric including 'reduction expectations' and 'ecological explosion', waiting for the peak of FOMO sentiment to complete the ultimate harvest.
What we should really think about at this moment may not be 'can we still play', but rather how to escape this predicament. When a CEO of a certain platform said in an internal meeting that 'retail investors have a memory of only 7 days', it doomed the market's distorted ecology. The antidote may lie within Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper: true blockchain does not require 100 new coins every day, does not need hundredfold leverage, and does not need to program human greed into harvesting code as 'innovation'.
The screen lights up again, and my friend asks, 'So are you still in this market?' I look at the dusty (Bitcoin white paper) on my bookshelf and type the last line: 'When the tide goes out, at least make sure you are not swimming naked.'
[Full text 798 words, through industry black box revelations + data evidence + cognitive deconstruction, to build a systematic risk warning]
