The trading screen was still bright at three in the morning; I habitually clicked on the candlestick chart, my fingertips unconsciously rubbing the mouse scroll wheel—this action has repeated for a full ten years. From being a naive newcomer when Bitcoin was $3 to now being an industry veteran referred to as a 'senior analyst', the most profound lesson this industry has taught me is: the market always rewards the clear-headed madmen and punishes the self-proclaimed clever fools.
Back in 2014, charging into the cryptocurrency world with all my savings felt like an absurd comedy. In the electronics market in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, I resold mining machines during the day and studied 'Blockchain: Technology-Driven Finance' in the urban village at night. I remember the first time I saw the Bitcoin white paper; the shock was akin to being struck by lightning—who knew currency could exist without a central bank, trading could bypass the SWIFT system? This was simply an open-source revolution in the financial world!
But reality quickly gave me a harsh lesson. The MT.Gox exchange bankruptcy in 2015 made the tuition for my cryptocurrency enlightenment class incredibly expensive. When I saw my account balance return to zero overnight, I squatted beside the iron bed in my rented room, smoking half a pack of Hong Shuangxi, with cigarette butts piling up in a plastic cup. That day, I understood a cruel truth: this market doesn’t care about sentiment; it only recognizes risk control.
The real transformation happened during the ICO frenzy in 2017. While everyone was going crazy over the slogan 'Blockchain will change the world', I led my team to develop the first on-chain fund flow tracking model. I remember one night during an overtime session, we issued a three-hour early warning about a certain celebrity project’s exit risk through address clustering analysis. When the news of the project team deleting databases and absconding broke, the WeChat notifications in the office were more intoxicating than any celebratory wine.
This decade has witnessed too many surreal scenes: exchange owners hosting yacht parties in Bali, contract players lining up to jump off rooftops, NFT avatars being sold for astronomical prices while the holders collectively forget. I gradually formed my own analytical framework—breaking down on-chain data into a map of capital migration, simulating the dealer's operation path using game theory, and even developing a market panic index based on the entropy method. These methodologies were tested during the crash on March 12, 2020, and the peak of the bull market in 2021, yet each time I reviewed it I would still break out in a cold sweat.
Now, when faced with new traders from the post-2000 generation, I always remind them to watch two indicators: the growth rate of non-zero balance addresses and the stablecoin exchange ratio. These two unpretentious data points are more real than any KOL's calls. Just like how we accurately predicted the collapse of LUNA last year, relying on the abnormal fluctuations in the on-chain collateral ratio when UST became uncoupled—when algorithmic stablecoins start shuffling funds around, it’s the countdown to systemic risk explosion.
Recently, while sorting through ten years of data, I found an interesting phenomenon: at the critical points of each bull and bear market transition, there is a significant migration in the IP distribution of exchange deposit addresses. 2017 saw the entry of Silicon Valley elites, 2020 witnessed Wall Street institutions joining, and this cycle, addresses of Middle Eastern sovereign funds have started to become active. The trajectories of these capital migrations are like geological layers in the blockchain world, recording the codes of wealth and power changes.
At this moment, looking at the candlestick chart on the screen, I suddenly think of the 2014 version of myself who burned the midnight oil in Huaqiangbei. Over the past ten years, the market has undergone countless changes in tactics, but human greed and fear have remained unchanged. Perhaps true cultivation is not about predicting the next hundredfold coin, but about learning to stay clear-headed amidst collective mania and upholding principles in the darkest moments. After all, in this noisy market, only those who can hear the sound of their own heartbeat deserve the title of 'analyst'.
