
Author: Tian Daxia (@Web3Donny)
On the day of the interview with Guo Yu, he happened to return to Tokyo from Hokkaido.
It was May this year, and the rainy season in Tokyo had just begun. When he talked about the summer in Hokkaido in the video chat, there was a rare lightness in his tone.
“I prefer Hokkaido in summer to winter.”
Guo Yu said that Furano in winter is crowded with tourists looking at Christmas trees, while Furano in summer only has rolling green hills. He and his friends drove through undisturbed roads, hiked, soaked in hot springs, and briefly escaped the humidity of Tokyo in the dry and cool air.
Guo Yu’s trip in Hokkaido
Three months after the interview, Guo Yu’s footprints extended to Tanzania, Sri Lanka, and returned to his “happy home” Maldives. After he ended his trip to the Middle East, I contacted him again.
Traveling has become a part of his daily life, and he seems accustomed to marking the passage of time with new geographical coordinates.
This former Internet entrepreneur and digital nomad seems to be always on the road.After more than five years of retirement, his understanding of “freedom” seems to be clearer:
“In the past, I thought financial freedom meant absolute freedom, but it was actually a wrong judgment… The most important thing is that we need to be aware of this issue and its importance at a very early stage in life.”
Guo Yu
Who is Guo Yu?
Guo Yu became well known to the public in 2020.That year, he wrote this sentence in a resignation letter –
“I choose to retire at the end of 28 years old, to embrace the clear springs and wind in the canyons, and to feel the spring, autumn, winter and summer.”
Four months later, this letter was suddenly uncovered and quickly ignited discussions across the Internet: some were envious, some questioned, and some regarded him as a representative of “the lucky ones in the Internet entrepreneurship boom.”
The words “young”, “retirement” and “wealth freedom” have become his labels.He has become the “escape template” imagined by countless young people.
In the restless node of the post-epidemic era, he became the most vivid “contrary sample” on social media – a person who turned away from the trend of the times.
childhood and growth
Guo Yu spent his childhood in the mines of Jiangxi.As a left-behind child, he was often extremely lonely during winter and summer vacations. His only solace came from the Christian books left to him by his grandmother and the self-expression brought by writing.These words and beliefs became the most important spiritual outlet in his early life.
Later, he came to study at Shenzhen Senior High School.The education here made him realize for the first time that “choice is more important than hard work.”
In this school, many students are children of entrepreneurs. Their anxiety is that “if they don’t get into the Ivy League, they will have to go back and inherit the family business.” At that time, Guo Yu was facing the reality that “his father was bedridden.”Shenzhen’s open atmosphere and diverse values have shaped his character of “never accepting fate”.
For him, destiny is not destined, but a process that can be constantly rewritten through choice and practice.
Guo Yu in high school
Later, he was successfully admitted to Jinan University, majoring in politics and administration.However, Guo Yu soon realized that this major could not support his future livelihood.So, he began to teach himself programming.
“At that time, there was no other way to go. I had to find a way to support myself.” With this persistence, he successfully joined Alipay, a subsidiary of Alibaba, and accumulated his initial industry experience here.
In the wave of the golden age of the Internet, Guo Yu seized his own opportunity and became part of the “option myth”.
In 2014, Guo Yu’s startup was acquired by ByteDance, and he officially joined the startup, which was valued at only $500 million at the time.Since then, his life has been pushed into a hurricane of wealth and dreams.
As an early employee, he devoted himself to the development of the company’s core projects.ByteDance’s valuation has soared hundreds of times in six years, and the stock options Guo Yu received early on have also risen accordingly.
Investment and crypto experience
In the past ten years, he first rode the wave of the Internet to achieve financial freedom, and then turned into a calm observer in the encryption field. He has experienced several rounds of rise and fall in the encryption market. Now, his perspective has become clearer.
Recently, he wrote something on Twitter, which aroused widespread resonance in the encryption community.
He wrote: “Many friends in the currency circle have no concept of money. Today they study this, and tomorrow they are all in that. Doing transactions, watching the market, and staying in front of the computer all year round can easily lose touch with reality. I still recommend everyone to read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles. Spend money on the experience of life. Luxury goods can be bought and money can be earned, but don’t get stuck in it and be unable to extricate yourself.”
A simple sentence, but it resonated inside and outside the circle.After the black swan incident on October 11, many people lamented: It seems that everyone has begun to lose their sense of reality and forget that money can still be spent on “living”.You can never spend all the money or make all the money, but you can never get back the life you lost.
Guo Yu’s encryption journey began in April 2013. He was working at Alipay at the time and was attracted by the hot discussion on Bitcoin breaking through $100 on Hacker News, and discussed it at an internal technology sharing meeting.
At that time, most transactions were completed through Taobao’s OTC channel. He joked that he even bought Ripple, which was promoted by Justin Sun at the time.
During the ICO craze in 2017, he tried writing smart contracts for the first time.Even after “retiring” from ByteDance and moving to Japan in 2020, he still published a long article on the Mirror platform in 2021, reviewing the technology trends he missed.
If Byte’s wealth allowed him to “retire” early, then the encryption world was a spiritual playground for him to keep his technical sense and ideological vitality before and after retirement.
Today, he is more like an observer and recorder who retreats from the sidelines.He admitted that he had not participated in the new generation’s craze for Meme Coins such as Trump Token, but “wanted to record these” because the younger generation is far more sensitive to opportunities than his contemporaries.
A sharp decline in the crypto market on October 11 prompted Guo Yu to once again systematically elaborate on his observations of the industry for more than ten years on Twitter.He systematically elaborated on his understanding of the Bitcoin price discovery mechanism and divided the process into three stages.
The first one is the “ancient OTC trading stage”.He personally experienced that period when over-the-counter trading was the dominant model, prices were very discrete, and the mining costs of mines determined the true price basis of Bitcoin for a long time.
The second is the “centralized exchange order book stage.”OTC was replaced by more efficient order books, but this also brought problems.Some exchanges have introduced futures and even perpetual contracts as their main business, and the price model no longer follows the basic logic of supply and demand.
The third one is “the phase of changing hands on Wall Street after the passage of the Bitcoin ETF.”
Guo Yu believes that from that moment on, Bitcoin has lost the meaning of its original design: “to help everyone resist the unlimited expansion of debt.” Because, from that moment to now, the pie is being transferred to Wall Street every day.”
He saw that CEX’s spot inventory and trading volume shrank sharply after that, and its trading volume could no longer reflect the true price of the pie.He predicts that Wall Street’s next step will turn mainstream tokens into interest-earning assets, and prices will tend to stabilize.
“I think the pie story has reached its final chapter here, and the four-year cycle has ended.”
He concluded on the night of the plunge, “Sadly, that’s not really what it was designed to do. But it’s a good story nonetheless.”
Unlike many players who pursue short-term profits, Guo Yu still retains the crypto assets he bought early and has never realized them.
He said with a smile that the reason was actually very simple: “It’s too troublesome to liquidate and pay taxes, and I have enough money to spend.”
Travel, love, daily life
If the crypto world is his “spiritual playground” for retirement, then the journey in reality is his way to reach freedom.
Travel and hot springs are important parts of his life. During the epidemic, he traveled almost all over Japan and stayed in 530 hot spring hotels.When talking about the characteristics of each place, he seemed to be dismantling a sophisticated algorithm: Kurokawa Hot Spring in Kyushu is famous for its scenery, Kusatsu Hot Spring pays attention to pH value and minerals, and the mixed bathing culture can be traced back to the Meiji era.
In Tokyo, he maintains a state of “comfortable alienation”: cleaning the room in the morning is like meditating, and watching the market for two hours in the evening; when traveling, these rules will be completely broken.
Writing is his consistent habit.Childhood diaries, high school essays, and current Twitter records.Although the form has changed, the essence of recording and reflection has not.He once wrote for City Pictorial, documenting the stories of Japanese hot springs.He even openly writes a “love diary” and candidly discusses open relationships.
2020 was the most controversial period for him on the Internet, and the overwhelming comments at that time caused him a lot of trouble.Now he has developed a coping mechanism: “Unless it involves family or partners, I basically don’t respond.”
This shift can be viewed as a form of strategic self-protection.When he lived in Tokyo, he enjoyed the status of an “invisible man”: he used self-service checkouts at convenience stores and registered at hot spring hotels under a false name, and no one paid attention to his identity.
His MBTI is INFJ.Introverted and restrained, but not locked in a room.On the contrary, his life list is full of “fun plans”: get a sailing license, learn a motorcycle driving license, and try some adventures he has never imagined.
freedom and arrival
He said that he was not born a “lucky person”, but through self-taught programming, seizing industry opportunities, and investing rationally, he gradually built his own path to financial freedom.
That’s why he decided to bid farewell gracefully at the age of 28, settle in Japan, write, travel, and live another life.
Now 34 years old, Guo Yu is still on the road.As you can see on social media, his journey never stops.
The difference is that now he is no longer obsessed with chasing the “next destination.”
For him, every departure is not to escape from the past, but to reach a more authentic self.
In the utopia of “retirement”, he takes freedom as the only coordinate and integrates wealth, technology, travel and intimacy into a flowing route.
On this route, he is not only looking for his own wave, but also a way of existence that transcends time and identity.
This is the true meaning of freedom: not getting rid of something, but learning to place yourself in the constant arrival.