When Bitcoin was first released in 2009, its price was less than 1 cent, and 1 dollar could be exchanged for 1,300 Bitcoins. By the end of 2017, it soared to 18,000 dollars, and then continued to fluctuate. After experiencing another round of skyrocketing at the end of 2020, Bitcoin broke through the 60,000-dollar mark in March 2021. Although it has recently fallen back to nearly 40,000 dollars, it has still surged thousands of times. This means that if you bought Bitcoin with the price of a pack of cigarettes in the early days, you are now at least financially free.
But now, Bitcoin has become an unattainable 'rich man', and it is also difficult to see another surge of hundreds of times. Everyone is hoping for these altcoins and dog coins to rise again.
Moreover, more and more inexperienced young people joined this wealth frenzy. Steven, a post-90s youth, saw his colleagues buying Dogecoin and SHIB, so he also invested 600 yuan. Another post-90s player, Yuzu, had almost no investment experience and did not understand what cryptocurrency or blockchain was; he initially invested only 400 yuan and was pleasantly surprised to find that his profits quadrupled in just two days. He realized, 'This is my only chance to change my social class.'
After entering several SHIB groups, I found that they were all born in the 1990s and 2000s. They hoard SHIB just to buy a hope. The traditional market tells me that houses maintain value, but I can't afford it; people who make money in the cryptocurrency circle tell me that Bitcoin maintains value, and I still can't afford it.
Due to the excellent performance of cryptocurrencies, many young people made money from their first investments. Perhaps because the money came too quickly, many were confused by the windfall.
In 2011, he bought Bitcoin worth 6,000 yuan, so his current net worth has already exceeded 100 million. Of course, at that time, very few people dared to do such a thing, and those who persisted benefited the most from the Bitcoin wave.
This is exactly the charm of Bitcoin.
The emergence of China's cryptocurrency circle began in 2009.
After unexpectedly receiving an email introducing the Bitcoin system, Wu Gang started using the company's computer for mining.
At that time, Wu Gang did not realize that he was at the forefront of China's cryptocurrency circle, but unfortunately, when he left his original company, he lost his wallet file, which contained 8,000 Bitcoins he had mined earlier. At current prices, this wealth amounts to 500 million yuan.
In 2011, Wu Gang re-entered the market and bought Bitcoin worth 300,000 yuan. More importantly, other well-known figures in the cryptocurrency circle also officially entered the market in 2011, including Li Xiaolai, Zhao Dong, Kao Mao (Jiang Xinyu), Wu Jihan, Pumpkin Zhang (Zhang Nanqian), and Changjia (Liu Zhipeng), all of whom started to engage with Bitcoin and buy large quantities around 2011.
This group of 'classmates' were all regulars at Garage Coffee, where Zhao Dong was the CTO at the time. This café, located on the second floor of No. 48 Xidajie, Haidian, can be considered a gathering place for the first generation of cryptocurrency tycoons in the country. Guo Hongcai (known as 'Baoyi Ye' in the cryptocurrency circle) simply referred to it as 'the birthplace of the cryptocurrency circle.'
On November 28, 2012, the Bitcoin block supply halved for the first time, decreasing from 50 to 25 every 10 minutes. At the same time, the issuance of Bitcoin accounted for half of the total issuance of 21 million, and the price of Bitcoin at that time was $12.4.
Garage Coffee truly gained popularity in 2013 when someone learned from a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz and bought a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and CCTV reported on this incident. This cup of coffee brought a lot of attention to Garage, attracting many cryptocurrency traders and entrepreneurs, including Huobi founder Li Lin.
Born in 1987 in the countryside of Loudi, Hunan Province, both of his parents are farmers.
The cryptocurrency circle is never short of stories of overnight wealth and myths of becoming famous in one battle. Yi Lihua counts as one of them.
Yi Lihua is the third child in the family, and his parents are farmers, living in poverty. However, they tried their best to support him and his brothers in their studies.
Yi Lihua took the college entrance examination three times and enrolled in Shanghai University of Technology in 2006, following the path where the college entrance examination changed his fate.
He was very mature from a young age. While studying at university in Shanghai, he started doing part-time jobs and entrepreneurship, and after graduation, he joined a private enterprise in Jiaxing, Zhejiang.
This is a company that makes cabinets, and Yi Lihua mainly focused on marketing. After staying in Jiaxing for a year, he returned to Shanghai to start his business.
He kept messing around with entrepreneurship, but for 2 or 3 years, he didn't make any money. Someone introduced him to a girlfriend, but he didn't even have money to treat her to a meal.
Yi Lihua's understanding of entrepreneurship was very superficial, just messing around with various small businesses, such as selling watches, software, and organizing events.
To save money, he rented a two-bedroom apartment in Shanghai and rented out two of the rooms, sleeping on the sofa in the living room to avoid paying rent.
He usually ate in the cafeteria at Fudan University, spending three or four yuan per meal, and worked on campus using the internet and tables; he once survived on 1,800 yuan for 9 months.
In the end, he made 3,000 yuan by organizing an event, which helped him get through a tough time. Perhaps this is what it means when heaven is about to bestow great responsibility on a person, it must first temper their will, work their muscles, starve their body, and impoverish them.
That period was very difficult; he said that if he went through it again, he definitely wouldn't be able to hold on. But it was precisely the hardships of life that paved the way for his subsequent change in fate.
During the most difficult days, by chance, at a government investment promotion event, to find investment institutions, he reached out to all the business owners he knew in Shanghai.
From technology to team, and then to business model, he analyzed and understood each one, and finally filtered from 400 people to submit his application materials. Yi Lihua successfully earned his first 5 million in life.
Having made money, he was reluctant to spend it, and later was persuaded by his family to buy a regular apartment in Changsha. The rest of the money was all invested in equity.
After completing the first pot of gold in 2013, I started classical investing and became a partner and director at Zhongwo Investment.
In 2015, while doing equity investment, Yi Lihua discovered one of China's earliest blockchain companies, which was also one of the first companies to start mining in the country.
In all martial arts, only speed cannot be broken. Yi Lihua understands this deeply.
Interested in blockchain, Yi Lihua immediately took out 600,000 yuan to try mining.
When many people hesitated and wavered about Bitcoin, Yi Lihua acted the fastest, buying Bitcoin with almost all the money he had.
At first, Yi Lihua mainly mined BTC, and the price of ETH was just a few dollars, with adults saying it would rise to tens of dollars.
