[The crypto world] is an endless gambling game
The 'post-Bitcoin era' of madness and division
Here lies the glimmer of a technological revolution
There are also shadows of financial gambling
There are both legends of wealth freedom,
There is also the truth of losing everything.
After Bitcoin (BTC) breaks through the $100,000 mark in 2024, it briefly surged to a historic high of $109,000 in early 2025, then fell into sideways fluctuations. Institutional funds flooded in through spot ETFs (BlackRock's IBIT added over 30,956 BTC in a single month, accumulating a holding of 582,000 BTC), but retail investors' excitement faded—people found that even if BTC prices hit new highs, the returns in their accounts became increasingly mediocre. Meanwhile, Ethereum (ETH) struggles to survive, Solana (SOL) barely maintains its heat thanks to Meme coins and Trump's 'endorsement', while other altcoins fall into a cycle of 'rise one day, drop for a week'.
On one side, traditional financial capital packages Bitcoin as 'digital gold' through ETFs, on the other side, grassroots speculators crazily hype 'dog-themed' Meme coins on the Solana chain; on one side, regulators are sharpening their knives, on the other side, the Trump administration signals 'regulatory loosening', pushing tokens like Ripple (XRP), which have long been suppressed by lawsuits, to violently rebound.
The crypto world has never been so divided; it is both a 'compliant asset' in the eyes of institutions and a 'wealth paradise' in the hearts of gamblers, as well as a 'key target for regulatory scrutiny'.
Bitcoin: the decline from 'revolutionary currency' to 'financial instrument', with 'decentralization' also disappearing.
Bitcoin in 2025 is no longer the weapon 'against fiat currency hegemony' described by Satoshi Nakamoto. The approval of spot ETFs has allowed Wall Street giants to gain pricing power, with BTC managed by institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity accounting for over 15%; they have completely 'tamed' Bitcoin through traditional financial tools like futures contracts and options. Price volatility appears mild, but undercurrents are strong; the Fed's hawkish policies can easily trigger a single-day drop of over 10%, while retail investors can only passively become fuel for the 'institutional harvesting cycle'.
Ironically, Bitcoin's 'safe-haven attribute' has become a self-deceptive lie. When the global economy falls into recession, BTC did not rise as expected, but instead fell in sync with the US stock market due to liquidity tightening. Its value support has completely devolved from 'technological faith' to 'consensus game'; as one analyst put it: 'The only reason Bitcoin is worth $100,000 is that enough people believe it is worth $100,000.'
Altcoins: a speculative feast and a vacuum of value
Meme coin frenzy: the spiritual opiate of the desperate; Meme coins on the Solana chain (like Trump-themed TRUMP and dog-themed derivatives) become the biggest winners of 2025. These tokens, which lack any technical content, rely on social media hype and the gimmick of 'fair launch' (no pre-mining, full circulation) to experience stories of skyrocketing hundreds of times in just two weeks. Yet behind the frenzy is extreme nihilism; investors know that 99% of Meme coins will go to zero, yet they continue to participate in this game of 'who runs faster'.
A 'resurrection market' under regulatory loosening; after Trump's election win, the market expects the SEC to relax regulations, leading to a retaliatory rebound for long-suppressed tokens like Ripple (XRP) and Tron (TRX). But this rise is essentially speculative trading based on 'bad news being fully priced in'. Taking Ripple as an example, despite the SEC lawsuit settlement, its actual application is still limited to niche scenarios in cross-border payments, and its market value relies entirely on 'regulatory dividends'.
Exhaustion of innovation and narrative bubbles; DeFi (decentralized finance) has degraded from an ideal of 'disrupting traditional finance' to a tool for 'mining arbitrage'; the NFT market has lost its cultural value due to excessive financialization; most AI + blockchain projects remain in the white paper stage. True technological innovations (like zero-knowledge proofs and modular blockchains) are difficult for retail investors to understand; market attention is entirely drawn to gimmicks like 'Trump concept coins' and 'Musk-pumped dog coins'.
Regulation: the endgame of a cat-and-mouse game?
The 'sword of Damocles' of legislation; the University of Tokyo has initiated virtual currency legislation, explicitly targeting money laundering, fraud, and other behaviors, and requiring trading platforms to complete KYC (user identity verification) and anti-money laundering compliance transformations. This has directly led to the batch shutdown of small and medium exchanges, with funds concentrating on major platforms like Coinbase and Binance. For ordinary investors, compliance means higher trading costs and lower anonymity; the once 'free utopia' is disappearing.
America's 'regulatory double standards'; the Trump administration has an open attitude toward BTC but maintains high pressure on altcoins. After SEC Chairman Gary Gensler's departure, although lawsuits have decreased, the 'Howey Test' still hangs like a sword over project teams, with any token attempting to promise returns to investors potentially being deemed an 'unregistered security'.
The prisoner's dilemma under global competition; the EU's MiCA legislation, Japan's exchange licensing system, and Singapore's sandbox regulation have led to 'regulatory arbitrage' in the crypto space due to policy differences among countries: project teams register in the Cayman Islands, servers are located in Switzerland, and users come from Southeast Asia. This fragmented regulation seems to protect innovation, but in reality, it exacerbates systemic risks; once a country's policy changes abruptly, the market will face a chain reaction.
Ordinary investors: new investors, old investors, and 'quantitative investors'
New investors are the 'tender shoots' kidnapped by traffic; the 'crypto mentors' on short video platforms are still promoting 'thousandfold coin secrets', but the survival environment for new investors is ten times worse than in 2021. New coins listed on exchanges require 'voting for listing' (in reality, paid promotion), project parties unite with market makers to pump and dump, KOLs are paid to promote, and after a series of moves, retail investors often lose everything in the violent ups and downs.
Old investors are those with PTSD; having experienced the collapse of Luna and the FTX explosion, veteran players have long lost their 'faith'. They no longer hold any tokens for the long term but are obsessed with short-term operations of 'chasing meme coins → running fast → switching to BTC'. The spread of this 'financial nihilism' results in market liquidity increasingly relying on speculative funds, and the value discovery mechanism has completely failed.
'Quantitative investors' are the gamblers of the AI era; by 2025, on-chain quantitative robots and AI trading assistants have become standard. Retail investors believe that using 'smart strategies' can beat the market, unaware that algorithms are also controlled by the big players; a certain AI token recommendation tool was found to accept bribes from project parties, prioritizing high-commission tokens. When both humans and machines fall into being pawns of gambling, the 'decentralization' of the crypto world becomes a complete joke.
There is no savior in the crypto world; the crypto landscape of 2025 is a testing ground distorted by capital, policy, and human nature. For ordinary people, the only certainties are two points: one is that the myth of sudden wealth belongs only to a very few, and the other is that any market will ultimately reward those willing to slowly become rich.
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