**Essay**
At 14, you accidentally saw a post about Bitcoin on a cyber café computer, saying someone exchanged tens of thousands of coins for two pizza vouchers. You scoffed and closed the webpage, unaware that your mother was secretly selling the last gold necklace due to debts your father incurred from gambling.
At 15, your deskmate boasted that his uncle 'got rich overnight from trading coins', and you clenched the coins you had saved for half a year in your backpack — money you earned running errands for neighbors. After school, you hid in a toilet stall searching for 'how to mine', downloading your first Bitcoin wallet with a rusty USB drive.
At 17, the concept of Ethereum smart contracts fascinated you. You found half a book (Principles of Cryptography) at a second-hand stall with your breakfast money, the front page inscribed with 'To the future', you placed it under your pillow, dreaming of the code torrents in a decentralized world.
At 18, two hours before the deadline for college entrance exam application, you crossed out 'Accounting' and filled in 'Blockchain Engineering'. Your mother on the other end of the phone was silent for a while, only saying: 'Eat more meat in the cafeteria, if money is tight, you need to talk.'
At 19, during the DeFi wave, you stayed up all night in your dormitory with a second-hand laptop writing arbitrage scripts. One morning, an unexpected 0.5 ETH appeared in your account, making you finish your first cold steamed bun in three days while facing the sunrise.
At 20, you live-streamed contract trading on Twitter, with the title 'Hundredfold Path'. That night, you experienced a 312-style crash, and when the liquidation warning popped up, the comments flew by suggesting 'restart'. You silently deleted your account and read (Blockchain: Technology-Driven Finance) for the seventh time.
At 21, you were immersed in dark web forums researching zero-knowledge proofs, your right eye developed floaters from long hours staring at screens. One time, after a vulnerability analysis post was liked by a certain anonymous big shot, a message appeared in your inbox: 'In the dark forest, survive at light speed.'
At 23, when the Layer2 ecosystem exploded, the cross-chain protocol you designed was suddenly adopted by mainstream exchanges. Your childhood deskmate who took your coins privately messaged asking 'how to enter', and you captured a sentence from Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper: 'If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you.'
**Essay**
At 24, the cross-chain protocol you developed topped the GitHub trends due to Gas fee optimization, yet at three in the morning you received an audit report — a certain function had a reentrancy attack vulnerability. You trembled as you typed the emergency pause contract code, outside the window the rain poured heavily, and you vaguely recalled that night at 19 when 0.5 ETH popped up in your account.
At 25, DAO governance became mainstream. You witnessed a leading project split into two factions over proposal disagreements in Discord, with major token holders crushing community creativity with their voting power. You turned off the camera and told your team members: 'True decentralization begins with giving up the desire for control.'
At 26, virtual land auctions soared to millions of dollars. You were invited to speak at a virtual conference, with a PPT made of smart contracts written in Solidity, when a floating pixel avatar in the audience suddenly asked: 'If the metaverse collapses, is on-chain data a grave or an inheritance?' You were stunned for two seconds, pulling up your wallet address from that rusty USB drive from ten years ago.
At 27, central bank digital currencies squeezed the survival space for public chains. Your mother reminded you on video calls, 'Don't do virtual stuff, get a stable civil service job,' yet you secretly minted the 20 yuan coin that was taken from you in childhood into an NFT, with a note on the chain reading: '1999-2026, inflation rate 3800%'.
At 28, the industry was in a winter slump. Exchanges faced a chain of collapses, and Twitter was filled with mockery of 'blockchain scams'. You set up a satellite antenna on the roof of a guesthouse in Lhasa, demonstrating to children in remote areas how to send and receive textbooks via the Lightning Network — at a certain moment, you thought of that 15-year-old boy hiding in a toilet stall searching 'how to mine'.
On your 30th birthday, Vitalik Buterin retweeted the quantum-resistant signature algorithm paper you designed. In your inbox lay a new message from your deskmate: 'I took your coins back then because I was afraid you would starve,' with an attachment of a transfer, the note saying: 'Pizza debt, annualized compound interest 214000%'. You laughed and screenshot it to tweet, captioned with the last page of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, which was blank.#区块链 #Web3