From Alipay Intern to Bitcoin Prophet: Guo Yu's Path to Wealth Awakening

In 2013, when most Chinese programmers were scrambling for offers from BAT, a young man named Guo Yu was secretly researching an unfamiliar term called 'Bitcoin' at his workstation in Alipay. This 28-year-old programmer, who was earning barely over 10,000 yuan a month at the time, could not have imagined that seven years later he would achieve financial freedom through Bitcoin, nor could he have anticipated that in 2025, when Bitcoin surpassed $100,000, he would become the first to publicly declare that 'Bitcoin is dead.'

1. The Gears of Fate Begin to Turn

On a deep night in April 2013, Guo Yu saw the letters 'btc' for the first time on the Hacker News forum. At that time, Bitcoin was just over $100, and this ordinary engineer from Alipay used all his savings of 100,000 yuan to buy in. Three months later, Bitcoin skyrocketed to $1,000, and his assets multiplied tenfold.

'I was purely attracted by the technology at that time,' Guo Yu recalled, 'but when I discovered that Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper solved the Byzantine Generals' Problem, I knew it was not just about money.'

2. The Transformation from Geek to Believer

In February 2020, Guo Yu announced his retirement on Weibo. By then, the value of the Bitcoin he held had exceeded 200 million yuan, and combined with the early stock options from ByteDance, this post-90s individual achieved true financial freedom. However, his understanding of Bitcoin was undergoing a profound transformation.

'In the early days, I thought Bitcoin was a weapon to disrupt traditional finance,' Guo Yu said, 'but on the day the spot ETF was approved in 2023, I watched as BlackRock's holdings surpassed Satoshi's, and suddenly realized that Bitcoin won the battle but lost the war.'

3. The Loneliness of the Awakened

In the spring of 2025, as Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 and the whole network celebrated, Guo Yu wrote the shocking judgment that stunned the crypto community: 'The era of Bitcoin decentralization has ended.' In his view, when 70% of Bitcoin is held by institutions and mining is monopolized by publicly listed companies, Satoshi's original intention has already disappeared.

'Current Bitcoin is like a tamed beast,' Guo Yu metaphorically stated, 'it has entered the zoo of traditional finance, secured but has also lost its wildness.'

4. Advice for Ordinary Investors

Cognitive Monetization Principle: Guo Yu spent 5 hours a day studying blockchain technology in the early days, and his iron rule was 'never invest in things you don’t understand.'

Position Management Secret: Even when he was most optimistic, he never exceeded a 50% position.