At three in the morning, when the K-line chart once again draws a guillotine-like bearish line, you extinguish your seventh cigarette amidst the glaring red screen, your trembling finger hovering over the 'cut loss' button but unable to press it down—this is the third liquidation this year, and the last ETH in your wallet is lying in the staking contract earning you an annual 'minimum guarantee' of 3.8%.
The collapse of crypto people often starts from 'what could have been avoided'. Three years ago, you instinctively could have cashed out to buy a house when Bitcoin was at $20,000, but you believed the myth of the 'eternal bull market'; last year, you could have stopped your losses on the eve of LUNA going to zero, yet you re-invested all your savings in Anchor Protocol's 19.8% high interest; last week, you could have escaped when Musk tweeted about DOGE, but you found yourself smiling bitterly at the exchange's crash 404 page, recording a short video: 'Brothers, the wind on the rooftop is a bit noisy.'
The absurdity of this world lies in the fact that the more we are harvested, the more we believe in technological ideals. When Vitalik wrote 'code is law' in the white paper, no one expected the biggest legal loophole to be called 'the dealer's chips'; when Satoshi Nakamoto used hash algorithms to counter centralized hegemony, no one calculated that the most violent algorithm is called 'policy black box'. When exchanges crash, we angrily criticize centralization, yet we frantically recharge our faith when the market starts; when project teams run away, we shout for decentralization but rush to fill in ID and facial scans in airdrop events.
But we are still refreshing the block explorer every night. Not out of greed, but because we are all too aware of the dark currents hidden beneath this murky water: when El Salvador puts Bitcoin on its national flag, when BlackRock knocks on the SEC's door with its ETF application, when a country's pension fund starts allocating 0.5% of its assets to crypto—those numbers once seen as scams, Ponzi schemes, and speculative toys are gradually eating away at the financial fortress of the old world.
Some mock us as digital gamblers, yet fail to see the bloodier casino outside the gambling table: in the fiat currency system, the Federal Reserve quietly dilutes 10% of your wealth every year, in the stock market, high-frequency trading sees the future 0.003 seconds before you do, and in the real estate game, banks use 30 times leverage to decide your life. Yet we can at least look at every line of instruction in the contract code, and in the moment when the smart contract locks in, briefly touch the illusion known as 'programmatic justice'.
Perhaps true faith lies in betting 1% of our chips on a future that might prevent our children from signing thirty-year mortgage contracts, knowing that 99% of projects will go to zero. Just like that programmer in 2010 who bought pizza with ten thousand bitcoins; what he lost was not only $260 million but also a crazy wager about 'humanity can redefine value'.
As dawn approaches, you finally post the screenshot of last night's liquidation in the community, captioned: 'Looking for a reliable dog, betting it all to change my fate.' Three replies instantly pop up in the comments:
'Bro, the new Musk concept chain MARS has only 30 whitelist spots left!'
'Download the exchange app to receive a $100 newcomer voucher.'
'On the road to zero, at least we don't have to face inflation alone.'