In the summer of 2017, 24-year-old Xiao Bei worked as a programmer in Shanghai, earning a monthly salary of 18,000 yuan. He browsed Zhihu and saw "ICO changes destiny," using all his savings of 220,000 yuan plus the money his parents gave him for buying a house to buy three types of altcoins in one go: one called TRON, another called EOS, and a third called BTS, which was a 'graphene project'.
In December of that year, TRON rose from $0.002 to $0.3, and Xiao Bei's paper profit was 30 million. He resigned and returned to his hometown of Harbin, ordered a Mercedes GLE costing 800,000 yuan, and wrote on social media, "Thanks to blockchain, I achieved a leap in class." His parents urged him to sell, but he said, "This is just 1% of the bull market."
In January 2018, Bitcoin crashed from $20,000, and altcoins fared even worse. Three months later, TRON dropped back to $0.01, EOS was halved three times, and BTS went to zero directly. In the end, Xiao Bei was left with only 40,000 yuan and canceled his car order without even picking it up. His parents' money for buying a house was all gone, and he didn't dare return home, renting a 30-square-meter shared apartment in Shanghai, continuing to write code.
Eight years have passed, and he has never touched leverage again, nor has he invested in hundredfold altcoins. Every time he gets paid, he only uses 10% to buy Bitcoin through dollar-cost averaging, saving the rest in the bank.
The cruel truth of the cryptocurrency world is: all opportunities that promise to make you rich overnight will ultimately cost you ten years to pay back. True financial freedom has never been about going all-in, but about surviving to the end.
