"Playing with contracts means death."
Such advice can be found everywhere in the "cryptocurrency circle", but Yang Yi (pseudonym) chose to ignore it. The thrill of speculation made him lose himself.
A fascinating legend
In the cryptocurrency circle, the name "Liang Xi" is regarded as a legend.
On May 19, 2021, the digital currency market experienced a sharp drop.
Data shows that the total amount of "margin calls" on that day reached US$6.28 billion, equivalent to approximately RMB 40.4 billion.
On this day, many people sold their digital currencies and fled the market.
However, Liang Xi used an initial capital of 1,000 yuan and high-leverage trading to snowball his funds and achieve terrifying returns.
He acquired a fortune of 10 million yuan, and he was only 17 years old at that time.
From an "entry-level" player to a multi-millionaire, it only took overnight.
This story has long inspired Yang Yi. His persistence in the cryptocurrency circle is also due to his dream of becoming a person like Liang Xi.
Once you enter the cryptocurrency world, it is like entering a deep sea. Getting rich overnight is just an illusory legend.
Yang Yi was born in a small county town, where his parents worked on construction sites for a living.
In the eyes of his parents, Yang Yi has always been a well-behaved child. Originally, they thought that Yang Yi should go out to work after finishing junior high school, but Yang Yi insisted on going to high school.
In their small county, only about half of the high school students can go to college. Yang Yi's grades are below average, and even if he works hard, he can only get into a third-tier university.
Therefore, when Yang Yi was in his second year of high school, he began to feel confused and began to think that "studying is useless". In the end, he chose to drop out of school and go out to work.
He came to Wenzhou and worked for half a year at the construction site where his parents worked, but he didn't like the job there.
Because his father had fallen from a height and suffered a comminuted fracture, the foreman only paid him 20,000 yuan in compensation.
He began to look for other ways. He first returned to the county to take the military service physical examination, but was unable to join the army because of hyperextension of his elbow joint.
He found a job in a karaoke bar in the county town, but he could only earn 2,000 yuan a month. Eventually, he had to return to the construction site.
By chance, he saw the story of "Liang Xi" on the Internet, and he was deeply fascinated by this story of getting rich overnight.
He began to try to understand the cryptocurrency world, and started his initial attempt at "cryptocurrency speculation" with a few hundred dollars.
He tried contract trading, which is similar to futures trading in the stock market, and makes profits by predicting the rise and fall of digital currency prices.
If combined with leverage, it can double the initial principal, thereby multiplying profits.
For example, if your initial capital is 10,000 yuan, you buy Bitcoin with 100 times leverage.
When the price of Bitcoin rises by 1%, your principal will increase by 100%, which means a profit of 10,000 yuan.
However, if you bet in the wrong direction, the loss is also 100%.
If the price of Bitcoin drops by 1%, your 10,000 yuan principal will disappear quickly. This situation is called "margin call".
Yang Yi learned to trade from the veterans on the forum, but in most cases, his decisions eventually led to "margin trading".
Even if he once made some gains, he always expected the price to continue to rise, but eventually he always encountered a reversal of the market trend and ended up losing all his funds.
After several failed investments, Yang Yi felt deeply powerless. It was very difficult for someone like him who had no funds and could only play high-leverage games with extremely high risks to succeed.
After much hesitation, he decided to "quit the circle", left the county, and went to Shanghai to try his luck.
Pikoliu4 (Silvi)
A shortcut for small town youth to turn their lives around?
The word "waste" was posted by Yang Yi on his circle of friends on July 1 last year.
He should have found hope in life again through his struggle for a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan in Shanghai, so why did he fall into decadence?
At the beginning of last year, he arrived in Shanghai and followed his friends to join the food delivery industry with only one motive: money.
In his first month in Shanghai, he didn't make much money because he didn't work fast enough.
By early April, when lockdown measures came into effect, he and ten other deliverymen lived in a crowded room, frantically scrambling for orders from morning till night.
When the food delivery riders were released from lockdown early, he and his friends began delivering food all over the city, and would just find a bridge hole to sleep under at night.
By May, Yang Yi had already mastered the industry and rarely worked overtime.
In June, he finally saved some money by delivering food.
However, at this time, desire came back again.
"I feel like there might be a richer life waiting for me. The life here is so far from my ideal."
Shanghai made Yang Yi yearn for a better life, but the job of delivering takeout food caused great wear and tear on his body and was obviously not a long-term solution.
He thought of "cryptocurrency speculation" again.
At the end of June, Yang Yi embarked on the road of cryptocurrency speculation again.
He invested 5,000 yuan on the first day, but did not gain any profit.
But he still had 20,000 yuan saved over the past few months, so he gritted his teeth and invested it again.
"Spending money like water" cannot describe the passing of this money. In just two days, all the money was lost.
Yang Yi felt very frustrated and was about to end everything, but then he thought, "I might as well do something big," and his frustration turned into determination.
He opened the online loan software on his mobile phone and borrowed 80,000 yuan. Then he downloaded other online loan software and borrowed another 50,000 yuan.
Unfortunately, by July 1, the money was gone.
Yang Yi originally wanted to snatch a piece of meat from the lion's mouth, but ended up becoming the lion's meal.
“These things are not ours to play with.”
When delivering takeout in Shanghai, a rider who was ten years older than Yang Yi heard that Yang Yi was involved in the cryptocurrency world and came to talk to him.
This brother speculated in stocks when he was young and lost 400,000 yuan. He is still repaying his debts today.
He said to Yang Yi: "These things are not for us to play with. All we know is to throw money in them and we can't even hear a sound."
The eldest brother's words did not alert Yang Yi.
It was not until the debt collection call came to Yang Yi's parents that they knew what their son had left behind.
130,000 yuan is a huge sum of money for a family from a county town. How to repay it has become their biggest worry.
Yang Yi followed his parents' advice and returned to work on the construction site. His parents borrowed money from everywhere to help him repay his debts.
A while ago, Yang Yi got off work from the construction site and looked up to see a rainbow. This was his "first time to be so close to a rainbow."
However, Yang Yi did not want to work on the construction site forever. Since dropping out of school, the days on the construction site have occupied four-fifths of his youth.
In his diary, Yang Yi wrote:
"The construction site will not be my destination for the rest of my life. When I recover from my injuries, I will come out again. Even though I am in pain, I don't want to live a monotonous life."
Not only that, Yang Yi also doesn't want to do things like delivering takeout, delivering express, or screwing screws in factories.
In Yang Yi's opinion, if given the opportunity, he will rush back into the "cryptocurrency circle".
When asked if he would trade in cryptocurrencies again, he hesitated for a moment and said with some reluctance that if he had the chance, he would definitely try it. On his desktop, he still has a special category for cryptocurrencies software, which includes some exchanges and information software, a total of ten.
I can never give up the little hope in my heart.
Chasing dreams is chasing your own misfortune. On the street full of sixpences, he looked up and saw the moon - Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence".
Everyone, please move your hands and pay attention~
Thank you for your support, see you next time!
