【Boiling Era: When Youth Meets the Crypto Craze】
In a Seoul internet cafe at three in the morning, twenty-year-old Kim Min-jun stares intensely at the screen with red eyes, each tremor of the K-line chart affecting his breath. This summer, which should have been spent preparing for college entrance exams, he exchanged his tutoring fee for his first Ethereum. Three hundred kilometers away in a Shanghai rental apartment, twenty-five-year-old programmer Chen Hao has just finished his 76th contract liquidation but transfers his year-end bonus into the exchange—"betting on one more chance to turn things around."
Behind this global youth storm stands a series of shining legends. Four years ago, Zhao Changpeng was still eating instant noodles in a garage wearing a T-shirt and slippers, but now he tops the Chinese wealth list; Li Xiaolai, an ordinary English teacher in a New Oriental classroom, has turned Bitcoin into a fortune worth tens of billions; even more shocking is American teenager Eric, whose grandmother's thousand-yuan red envelope has turned into assets worth over a hundred million in Bitcoin. These stories spread like wildfire, igniting the blood of young people.
Regulatory alarms have never ceased, but youth always comes with a rebellious gene. Some mortgage their homes to go all in, some stare at the screen for 72 hours straight and faint at their keyboards, while many others experience a rollercoaster of heartbeats in the midst of soaring and plummeting prices. In exchanges that operate 24/7, grassroots comebacks and wealth evaporation unfold every minute and second in a human drama.
As 560 million people crowd into this crypto feast, half of them are gamblers and dreamers under thirty. They may not all have a clear vision of the future of blockchain technology, but they have genuinely touched the possibility of class transition. However, this fast-moving wealth train never promises an arrival time—some cheer with tickets that have increased a hundredfold, while more weep at dawn holding liquidation texts.
History always repeats itself, but this time it seems truly different. When the post-2000 generation uses memes to hype Dogecoin, when college dorms become command centers for mining, and when old Wall Street investment banks begin to bow to Bitcoin, perhaps we are witnessing the most intense adolescent turmoil in the financial order. Just don't forget, there are no fairy tales of guaranteed profits here; every young person staring at the screen late at night is living a story of gambling with desire.
