In the winter of 2015, 32-year-old programmer Chen Yang curled up in front of the computer in a rented room in the city, and the price curve of Bitcoin at $170 was dancing on the screen. At that time, he had just been laid off from a startup, with only 2,300 yuan left in his bank account, and his wife's pregnancy check-up receipt was still pressed under the keyboard — this young man who once coded in big tech companies in Silicon Valley felt for the first time that the term "digital gold" was almost a mockery.
The first halving: When $170 became $85
Chen Yang's first investment came from his father's retirement money. He secretly exchanged 5,000 yuan for 29 bitcoins, and as he drew the candlestick chart in his notebook, his hands were shaking. Three days later, Bitcoin plummeted to $85, and his account was halved. That night, after finishing a whole pack of cigarettes on the balcony, he heard his wife softly ask inside, "Should we mortgage the house in our hometown first?"
The turning point happened in the spring of 2017. Chen Yang saw someone on a cryptocurrency forum using a "dollar-cost averaging + grid trading" strategy to navigate through bull and bear markets. He spent three months digesting (the principles of blockchain technology), modified an old computer at home into a node server, and woke up at 3 a.m. every day to record the block height. When Bitcoin broke through $10,000, the 29 coins in his account had turned into $320,000 — but what kept him awake at night was seeing a single mother post on the forum that she had used Bitcoin to raise the funds for her daughter's bone marrow transplant.
Black Friday: 72 hours from $20,000 to $3,800
On that "Black Friday" in November 2018, Chen Yang would forever remember that number: $17,483. He had just used all his savings and a 3x leverage to go long, and Bitcoin started to plummet. 72 hours later, when his account was liquidated, the price on the screen stopped at $3,800. He looked at the payment notice for his daughter's kindergarten in his phone and cried for the first time in the cryptocurrency world.
"That day I sat in Shenzhen Bay Park for an entire night, unable to understand why the technological revolution had turned into a gambler's carnival," Chen Yang later said during a community sharing. He deleted all trading software, picked up coding again, and spent three months developing an on-chain address tracking tool, which he made available for free to small miners. When Bitcoin climbed back up to $10,000 in 2020, his tool had already accumulated 500,000 users, and a blockchain security company bought the copyright for 200 bitcoins — this time, he did not rush to cash out but stored the coins in a cold wallet, setting up a "Bitcoin Education Fund" for his daughter.
Life in a cold wallet: From cryptocurrency trader to evangelist
In the spring of 2023, Chen Yang opened a "Blockchain Popular Science Studio" in his hometown. On the wall hung a Bitcoin block evolution chart that he painted by hand, and in the corner lay programming textbooks for left-behind children. Once, a middle school student came with half a year's pocket money to buy Bitcoin, and he did not take the money but spent three afternoons teaching the child how to use Python to scrape on-chain data: "The real blockchain is not the candlestick chart, but empowering every ordinary person to master their own data sovereignty."
Last winter, when Bitcoin broke through $60,000, the value of the coins in Chen Yang's cold wallet had exceeded $20 million, but he still rode his electric bike to the studio, often chatting with Aunt Zhang, who sells vegetables, about "decentralized finance." "I never thought that one day I would use Bitcoin to repair a bridge in my hometown when I was crying with my keyboard in 2015," he pointed to the banner on the studio wall, which was sent by a mountain primary school, saying, "Thank you, Bitcoin, for illuminating hope."
Epilogue: When digital gold shines into reality
Now Chen Yang still keeps the candlestick chart from 2015 on his computer, with an added annotation next to it: "The real bull market is not in the candlestick chart, but in the hearts of those who are willing to believe that technology can change their fate." Outside, under the sycamore tree, several middle school students were gathered around his electric bike, debating the arrival of the next halving cycle — just like that programmer drawing candlestick charts in a rental room ten years ago, their eyes sparkled with the same light, something more precious than Bitcoin: the courage to seek certainty amidst uncertainty.