In the summer of 2017, I stood on the rooftop of a building in Lujiazui, Shanghai, watching Bitcoin prices refresh historical highs on CoinMarketCap. The Starbucks paper cup in my hand trembled slightly, coffee stains blooming a brown flower on my suit's sleeve. That was the third month since I bought ETH with my year-end bonus, and the numbers in my account were expanding at a rate of 10% per day, just like the city's neon lights illuminating one by one at dusk, reflecting the hunger in the eyes of every young finance professional.
1. The Era of Frenzy: When Money Loses Its Gravity
In the 24-hour continuous rhythm of the exchange's market fluctuations, we gradually lost our real perception of numbers. At three o'clock one morning, when ETH broke through $800, I lay on the hotel bed laughing at my phone screen, the sheets still carrying the scent of champagne from the previous night's party. Industry bigwigs were @ing each other on Twitter, naming new coins after various animals, and those absurd MEMEs were like forbidden fruits in the digital Eden, tempting every self-proclaimed clever speculator.
In front of the OTC counter at the exchange, a long queue forms as the cleaning lady discusses 'Yuzu Coin' in dialect, while an investment bank VP secretly refreshes Blockfolio in the elevator. We believe that blockchain will reshape the world financial order, yet we selectively ignore the flawed token economic models in the white papers. When a certain altcoin surges 300% in a single day, the trading group suddenly falls silent, followed by a flurry of red envelopes—this is a new type of sacrificial ritual in the jungle society.
2. The Ice Age: Existentialism on the Candlestick Chart
In the winter of 2018, cold rain fell in Seoul as I typed on a keyboard in a shared office in a basement in Hongdae. In the blue light of the monitor, the weekly chart of BTC/USD was drawing a textbook-style death cross. The heater emitted a feeble buzz, reminiscent of the last few 'teachers' in the trading group who persisted in calling trades. That night, I cleared all leveraged positions and found my three years of savings evaporated like the mist on a window—having existed, yet leaving no shape behind.
In the deepest night of the bear market, I began to understand the quantum state characteristics of the crypto market: when you open your wallet, assets may exist in a superposition of profit and loss; the moment you close the app, it collapses into a certain value. Those KOLs who boasted about 'value investing' during the bull market saw their avatars darken, as if thrown into the irreversible river of time of blockchain.#钱包安全 
3. The Rebirth Game: The Zen of Dancing with Volatility
The madness of the summer of DeFi in 2020 taught me to write my own destiny formula using smart contracts. When I added ETH to a liquidity pool on Uniswap, I suddenly realized this was like dropping an anchor in a digital ocean—having to endure the capricious tides while believing in the eternity of underlying mathematics. When the NFT craze swept through, my CryptoPunk was displayed in a metaverse gallery, that string of hash values building a rainbow bridge between the virtual and the real.
Now, the homepage of my trading log bears Peter Lynch's warning: 'The nightmare of professional investors is that retail investors believe in the alchemy of turning stone into gold.' When the black swan of LUNA's crash swept by, the pre-set risk threshold automatically triggered stop-loss orders. Watching the social media filled with wails of despair, I brewed a cup of Pu'er and wrote the 37th edition (Position Management Guide) for my newly entered colleagues.
After seven years of cycles, the crypto market has completed the spiritual domestication of its participants through extreme volatility. The stings of liquidation at midnight, the regrets of missing out on hundredfold coins, the ecstasy of successfully escaping the peak, all ultimately settle into the cold numbers on trading terminals. In this casino without a central bank's safety net, we are both the dealers and the gamblers, reflecting our souls in the yin-yang alternation of each candlestick. When Bitcoin's fifth halving arrives, I turn off the market software and step into the night, knowing that the true bull market forever grows in the eternal game between humanity and machine algorithms.