jakiro
In 1986, a baby boy was born in Shaoyang, Hunan.
Don’t get me wrong. This baby boy is not the top five Chinese beauty bloggers later – Yanzu Lu, but the future richest man in Hunan – the roasted cat (Jiang Xinyu).
It is not an exaggeration to say that he is the richest man in Hunan.
Incomplete estimates, the two known Bitcoin wallets of Baked Cat have 74,715 Bitcoins. Based on the highest point in November 2024, Baked Cat has 54.9 billion yuan in assets, HunanThe richest man is sure.
However, it is very likely that the day when the roasted cat has not been alive to see itself become the richest man.
Roasted Cat has been a top student since childhood. In 2001, the 15-year-old Roasted Cat was admitted to the Youth Class of the University of Science and Technology of China with a total score of 11 in the country, becoming the pride of all Shaoyang.To this day, his name is still on the honor list of his alma mater, and he accepts the respect of his junior brother and sister.
In 2009, 23-year-old Jiang Xinyu published a paper titled “Building a Safe Threading Mechanism with Formal Methods”, graduated with a master’s degree, and went to Yale University to study for a Ph.D. in 2011.
No one knows that this trip to Roast Cat will bring a huge revolution to the Chinese Bitcoin market.
Speaking of Bitcoin, it can be traced back to a small circle that was born in 1992.
This year, a crypto-anarchist group was born.At a party, Timothy May, who worked as an electronics engineer at Intel, published the “Crypto Anarchism Manifesto”, formally proposing the concept of cryptoanarchism.
The first sentence of the declaration is familiar to us:
“A ghost, a ghost of crypto-anarchism, wanders around the modern world.”
The core view of crypto-anarchism is to use cryptography software to avoid nuisance, monitoring and reporting when sending and receiving information on computer networks, and strive to protect privacy and political freedom.
With religious piety, they decided to create a new digital technology with decentralization as the spiritual core and SHA256 algorithm as the foundation to counter the state supervision and commercial monopoly in modern society.
They firmly believe that this technology can subvert human society:
“Computer technology is about to enable individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a completely anonymous way.
…Combined with the emerging information market, encrypted anarchy will create a mobile market for all materials that can be expressed in words and images.
Get up, crypto anarchists, what you will lose will be a wire barrier!”
Speaking of which, although this view is very much like the wishful envelopment of idealists, in fact, they have really changed our lives.
Because Sir Tim Berners-Lee, BT download author Bram Cohen, one of Facebook founders, Sean Parker, Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, etc., are all members of this group.
Of course, it also includes Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?unknown.Until now, computer genius hackers and intelligence organizations from all over the world have not been able to unearth Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity, so some people suspect that Satoshi Nakamoto is a time traveler from the future.
It has to be said that Satoshi Nakamoto has not exposed his mysterious identity until now, and it is very encrypted anarchism.
In 2008, the global financial crisis broke out. On November 1 of the same year, Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system”, telling the world: “I am developing a new electronic currency system.”, adopts a completely point-to-point form, and there is no need for trusted third parties to intervene.”
At this point, Bitcoin, an electronic currency that can be controlled by any political or financial power, has begun to become known.
This means that crypto anarchists can have their own central bank and build their own financial system.
To verify his theory, at 18:15 on January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of Bitcoin on a small server in Helsinki, Finland, called the “Genesis Block”” and received the first mine reward – 50 Bitcoins.
At this point, Bitcoin was officially born, and Satoshi Nakamoto became the “creator”.
Satoshi Nakamoto soon announced the mining algorithm, and a group of technical geeks began to mine on servers of various universities, and the number of Bitcoin increased rapidly.
But the question comes soon, how to prove that Bitcoin has the function of currency?Or, how do you prove that Bitcoin can buy something?
On May 18, 2010, a password expert named Laszlo Hanyecz in Florida, USA posted a post online, willing to buy two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins, on the condition that they meet and trade.
You heard it right. According to the current market value of 10,000 Bitcoins, it is almost more than 7 billion yuan.
But at that time, everyone thought it was a joke and no one paid attention to it.
It was not until 4 days later that a British man, with the idea of ”I can’t buy two pizzas and I can’t buy them, but I can’t buy them.” He ordered two pizzas and sent them to Hanyez’s home, and got these 10,000 bitcoins. And RasLuo, soon ate these two pizzas worth RMB 7 billion.
Since then, May 22nd of each year has become the “Bitcoin Pizza Day” in the currency circle to commemorate the first commercial transaction of Bitcoin.
After the pizza incident, the value of Bitcoin began to be recognized by the world, Bitcoin transactions were born, and the price began to rise.
Soon, this road to wealth was noticed by the Chinese.
Interestingly, the first group in China to come into contact with Bitcoin was not the geeks at various universities that were most sensitive to technology, but the non-mainstream group of hair with messy colors in the town:
Game training.
In 2010, the hottest game in China was “World of Warcraft”. Behind World of Warcraft, there is a complete set of industrial chains of training and upgrading, competition, gold, equipment, and dungeons, with countless dozens of them.For non-mainstream people, they can get a few dozen yuan in hard work for one night. It is not a dream to sell good equipment for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Suddenly, in some QQ groups of agents, some advertisements for recruiting mining appeared. You only need to install one software and the computer will automatically mine, which will generally not affect your gameplay.Then you can get the coins the next day, and then sell the Bitcoin to the person who collects coins at a price of 2-3 yuan per coin. Generally, you can dig out 10 Bitcoins in one night, and at least you can get the money for a day.
So, Bitcoin has been carried forward in a very down-to-earth way in a group of non-mainstream hands that know nothing about crypto-anarchism.
These non-mainstream people with strange costumes would never have imagined how the string of codes they sold casually would be worth a lot in the future.
However, these first-generation miners soon faced a business crisis because mining technology was innovated at the end of 2010.
According to Satoshi Nakamoto’s setting, Bitcoin is in a utopian ideal state of “everyone is a central bank”, so everyone with a CPU can mine.You only need an ordinary computer or a software to start your mining journey.
However, this decentralization situation was quickly broken because GPUs entered the industry.
We all know that mining relies heavily on computing power. At the beginning, everyone used CPU to mine, but with in-depth research on mining algorithms, everyone found that mining was repeating the same work, and CPU was generalizedThe computing unit is not good at parallel computing at all. It can perform at most a dozen tasks at a time, and mining is too slow.
On the contrary, GPUs have thousands of stream processors that are inherently suitable for mining and are obviously more efficient.
Satoshi Nakamoto disagreed at the beginning. He even proposed to reach a gentleman agreement to artificially restrict GPU mining to maintain the “fair state” of mining.
However, Satoshi Nakamoto still underestimated human nature.
When Bitcoin has value, naturally, people want to make money from it.
As Hanyez opens the source of his optimization algorithm based on graphics card GPU mining (now know why he has 10,000 bitcoins, right?), the computing power of Bitcoin’s entire network has increased exponentially, and the unit has jumped rapidly from MH/s to GHThe level of /s is that it turns out that at most a dozen bitcoins are mined a day. After using GPU, the mining output has increased sharply, and it is not a dream to produce hundreds of them a day.
As a result, non-mainstream people in China began to flock to Internet cafes with good graphics cards again, which made the Internet cafe owner confused, indirectly promoted the first large-scale upgrade of graphics cards in China’s Internet cafes, and also solved the Nvidia crisis of Huang Jiaozhu.
Graphics card mining has been popular for two years and has encountered challenges again.
In June 2012, the American Butterfly Laboratory’s ASIC mining machine was successfully developed, bringing a new mining revolution.
ASIC mining machine uses ASIC chips as the core of computing power. Simply put, it is an ASIC chip customized for Bitcoin’s SHA256 algorithm, which can be exchanged for higher performance, smaller energy consumption, and smaller volume.
Let’s compare the current high-end 4090 graphics card, the mining capacity after optimization is 129.8MH/s, and the power consumption is about 322W. What about the mining machine Ant S9?The mining capacity is 13.5TH/s!Several orders of magnitude higher!
Whoever has a mining machine has the power to “make coins”.
At Yale, Roasted Cat heard about the development progress of Butterfly Laboratory and keenly smelled the opportunity to make money.
The post-80s generation grew up watching Readers. Readers once told a story about the gold rush in San Francisco. Because the competition was too fierce, few gold diggers made money, and gave them to the mines.The person who “sells shovels” makes a lot of money.
The roasted cat thought, why can’t I be the one who sells shovels?
So, almost as the Butterfly Laboratory’s successful development, Baked Cat posted a post on the Bitcointalk forum with the ID of Friedcat, claiming that it has the ability to develop mining machines and raise funds publicly from the community.
According to the financing plan of Roasted Cat, he dropped out of Yale and established Bitquan Information Technology Co., Ltd., with the company’s equity divided into 400,000 shares, worth 0.1 bitcoin per share.
No one realized that this is the first ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in the history of the world currency circle.
Baked Cat not only raises funds online, but also roadshows everywhere to promote its own mining machine.Finally, Baked Cat successfully raised 16,000 bitcoins, at the price at that time of about 1 million yuan.Among them, the one who invested the most was a 26-year-old man named Wu Jihan, who invested in a total of 15,000 bitcoins.
It is easy to do things when you have money. The research and development of Bake Cat’s mining machine was very smooth. In just two months, it launched its own product–the first generation of Bake Cat’s mining machine.
Baked Cat held the first generation of mining machines and conducted a mine trial in his own company warehouse. As a result, as soon as the computer was turned on, it accounted for 51% of the world’s Bitcoin computing power!
In other words, at least in early 2013, 51% of the world’s new Bitcoins were roasted cats!
At its peak, the number of Bitcoins dug by the “Roasted Cat Mine” in one month was as high as more than 40,000!
The huge success of the roasted cat mining machine has triggered collective panic in the currency circle. After all, there are only 21 million Bitcoins in total, and they have been poached by the roasted cat. What do others dig?
As a result, hacker attacks followed one after another.
In order to disperse hatred, Baked Cat only retained 20% of the computing power of the entire network, and all the excess mining machines were sold.
At that time, no mining machine was comparable to that of the roasted cat. Although the mining machine of Butterfly Laboratory was successfully developed, it was not mass-produced. And the Avalon mining machine developed by Zhang Nangeng, a doctor of Beihang University, also developed by the Chinese, did not have any Avalon mining machine, either developed by Zhang Nangeng, a doctor of Beihang University.The supply has begun, so in the ASIC mining machine market, roasted cats are the absolute king.
At that time, people from all over the world came to China to buy grilled cat mining machines in groups. Some recalled, “Some even threw the money over directly, picked up the mining machine and ran away, fearing that the mining machine would be snatched away.”
In this way, in half a year, roasted cat earned more than one billion yuan, and at this time, roasted cat was only 27 years old.
The roasted cat has a dream, he wants an island, which does not belong to any country, there is no army or police, on this island, the currency is Bitcoin, a freedom paradise belonging to crypto anarchists.
However, before he could earn enough money to buy the island, his dream was shattered early.
Mining machines are so easy to make money, so they naturally attract countless competitors.
In June 2013, the mining machines of Butterfly Laboratory were finally mass-produced. In July, the Avalon mining machines also began to be shipped one after another, and what about the roasted cat?Because he could not get TSMC’s 55nm chip, the second-generation mining machine was unable to successfully develop it, which caused the computing power of the Bakemao Mine to drop to 4% of the entire network.
It was not until January 2014 that Bakemao launched its third-generation mining machine BE300. It was originally thought that it could return to its peak, but due to packaging problems, this chip suffered continuous burn accidents, which eventually completely ruined Bakemao’s mining machine.The road.
At the end of 2014, the roasted cat disappeared and no one saw him again. The 74,715 bitcoins in his Bitcoin wallet were also missing.
The generation of roasted cats ends from now on.
Around August 2017, Baked Cat’s two wallet accounts transferred a total of 17,600 bitcoins in one week. On November 12, 2024, Baked Cat’s Bitcoin account, which had been silent for 7 years, woke up again and transferred 206.34 bits.Coin, worth $18.12 million.
Did these transfers be made by the roast cat?Or is it manipulated by others?Is the roasted cat still alive?No one knows.
All we all know is that the Bitcoin pioneer who wore a wrinkled T-shirt during the road show and his eyes were shining, would never come back.
two
The company of roasted cats was not going well, and Wu Jihan, the major shareholder who invested in him, could only find another way out.
At this time, Wu Jihan is no longer the fledgling rookie, but a big shot with tens of millions of assets (grilled cat dividends).
Because he is optimistic about Bitcoin, Wu Jihan still hopes to trade mining machines, so he thought of someone – Changzhang.
Changzhi is a pseudonym, which is not known to most people, but it is a well-known sci-fi circle.
We all know that Liu Cixin is the number one person in science fiction in China. From 1999 to 2006, she won the Galaxy Award, the highest Chinese science fiction award for seven consecutive years.
So who won the Galaxy Award in 2007 and 2008?
Long squid.
Coincidentally, Chang Chi is also from Hunan, with his real name Liu Zhipeng. He likes Chu Ci since he was a child. He especially likes Qu Yuan’s “Nine Chapters” in “The Long Chi is Lu Lixi, the cape of the clouds, the turquoise, and the bright moon is worn by Baolu”Heroic and romantic, so I named myself “Chang Zhu”.
In reality, Chang Yan is also a passionate idealist. At the age of 16, he started writing science fiction novels, such as “Kunlun”, “Road 674”, “The Wound of Fusang”, “The Skill of Dragon Slaying”, “Royal Kai is Still Alive”Articles have been published one after another, making him famous.
Some people commented: “His works are intertwined with modern history, and they are generous and proud in classical works, and the modern works are gradually showing off their beautiful west style.” After winning the Galaxy Award, many people regard him as Liu Cixin’s successor.
But after 2009, Chang Ye never published science fiction novels again.
Many people speculated that he was trapped in a creative bottleneck, but a netizen replied mysteriously in the post bar: “Chang Yan is doing something very sci-fi.”
That’s right, Chang is doing something very sci-fi – Bitcoin.
Let’s add a breakdown here. If we look through the history of the Chinese currency circle, we will find that there are many science fiction enthusiasts.
For example, Chang Yan, a science fiction writer.
Xuanlian founder “Crazy Xiaoqiang”, a science fiction writer.
Wu Jihan, the famous “magnet”, the chip he created after working alone comes from the English name of “Zhizi”.
How much does Wu Jihan like Liu Cixin?When he held the “World Blockchain Conference Wuzhen” in 2018, he even held a cross-border roundtable forum for Liu Cixin specifically to meet Liu Cixin.
Zhang Jian, founder of Fcoin, also named his “Singer Capital” from “The Three-Body Problem”.
etc.
Why do the science fiction circle and the initial currency circle highly overlap?
Perhaps because the two circles have a high degree of consistency, they are both sensitive to technology, delicate emotions, and like fantasy.
Bitcoin is inherently suited to their appetites. After all, this kind of thing is both technical and humanistic, both realistic and ideal.
Chang Yan is such a person. After he came into contact with Bitcoin in 2009, he was soon impressed by the grand ideal behind Bitcoin. Chang Yan recalled: “The emergence of Bitcoin perfectly matches my cloud era and grand distribution.Imagination of computing engineering. I was soon fascinated by it…”
In 2011, Chang Ye found a job within the system. Like Liu Cixin, he stumbled on the Internet during work, and specifically introduced Bitcoin to the public.
This year, a female college student asked a question on Zhihu: How should she invest in it with 6,000 yuan?
Changzhang gave an answer that was beyond everyone’s perception: “Buy Bitcoin, keep your wallet properly, and forget it, and look at it in five years.”
A few years later, Bitcoin soared. If this female college student had listened to Chang Ge’s advice, she would have been a billionaire.
So this reply was brought out and worshipped by countless people and became a generation of “Zhihu divine posts”.
However, at that time, what Chang Chang received was not praise, but ridicule. At that time, Bitcoin was at the bottom and no one believed that Bitcoin could make money.
Long-term dissatisfied, he began to publish Bitcoin articles on his blog and debate with the dark people.
One day, he suddenly received a message called QQAgent: “Blogger, I think your website is very valuable, why don’t you apply for an independent domain name and space? I’ll pay.”
This QQAgent is Wu Jihan.
However, Chang Chi was unwilling to follow Wu Jihan to work as a mining machine because he had a deeper understanding of Bitcoin than others.
Chang Chi believes: “If you only understand Bitcoin from the perspective of investment arbitrage, you are just a passerby in its life who is at ease; but if you understand it from the perspective of philosophy and technology, and sink into itIt, both in wealth and spiritual terms, is much richer than the former.”
Chang Chi was unwilling to get lost in the surge in wealth, so in 2011, Chang Chi cooperated with Wu Jihan to found Babbitt. Since then, the Chinese currency circle has its own Bitcoin media.
If the roasted cat is the one who sells shovels in the gold rush, then Changzha is the one who runs a tavern to sell intelligence.
However, it may be because of being too idealistic that Chang’s Bitcoin career was not going well. Both Babbitt and later Biyuan Chain were once popular, but fleeting.
Compared with those first-generation entrepreneurs who were contemporary with Changsha, but had long been financially free, Changsha was obviously not so “successful”.
Then why do we spend so much writing on the story of Changzhang?Not only because he is an evangelist of Chinese Bitcoin, but also because his Babbitt almost formed the entire currency circle in those years.
Let me put it this way, in that wilderness of Bitcoin, almost all the first generation of entrepreneurial tycoons knew each other in Babbitt.
One day in 2013, a man named “GGGGG” posted a post, and the core content of the post was based on the offline base.
The location is located in the holy place of grassroots entrepreneurs in Beijing: Garage Coffee.
That time, the basic line was full of scattered people, but most people became big shots in the future, such as Shenyu, Zhao Dong, Li Xiaolai, Pumpkin Zhang, etc., talking about the future of Bitcoin.
Since then, players in the currency circle around the country have begun to frequently organize offline bases, connect resources together, recruit people to cooperate, and create one currency circle myth after another.
For example, Wu Jihan met Zhan Ketuan, who was a partner in integrated circuits, and joined hands to establish Bitmain.
Pumpkin Zhang met Li Jiaxuan and established Beijing Canaan Creative Innovation Information Technology Co., Ltd., which also became a later mining machine giant.
Li Xiaolai met Zhu Fangyi and started to build his own mine.
Li Lin met Du Jun and began to plan to build a platform.
Of course, there is also the roasted cat, and a considerable number of mining machines are also sold on the forum.
These people often gather in a small yard, chat all night, and then leave with great courage.
It was as dark as ink, the lights were dim, and the road ahead was hard to see clearly, but everyone was still full of enthusiasm.
With the connection between the first token circle enthusiasts, mining machines and mines on the market began to bloom everywhere, including silverfish, bees, Rand, TMR, SmarT, 42BTC, etc., marking the arrival of the golden age of China’s Bitcoin.
As more mining occurs, problems follow.
In the communication, the biggest pain point of these first-generation entrepreneurs in the currency circle is that they have mining machines and Bitcoin, but they lack trading platforms that Chinese people can control.
In that era, Bitcoin transactions around the world were mainly monopolized by two platforms, namely Mt.Gox in Japan and BitStamp in Slovenia.
And what about China?There is only one trading platform – Bitcoin China.
The founder of Bitcoin China is Yang Linke. He was originally a sauna device seller. He accidentally invested tens of thousands of yuan to build a Bitcoin China trading website.
However, this trading system is very simple, and recharge requires online banking to make payments to two people’s accounts.Their holders are Yang Linke’s wife and mother-in-law–
This is not science fiction at all.
More importantly, both domestic and foreign platforms have problems such as low security and slow speed, and two-way transaction fees are often charged three-thousandths of a two-way transaction fee.
If people in the circle complain too much, people will naturally focus on this business.
So, in 2013, two new Bitcoin trading platforms, Xu Mingxing’s OKCoin and Li Lin’s “Huobi.com”, were born.
In order to seize the market, OKCoin and “Huobi.com” have adopted a free handling fee model. This model is very similar to China’s booming Internet industry. They first use the free model to encircle users and then charge fees when they occupy the market.
With this move, the Chinese Bitcoin exchange instantly crushed the international exchange and quickly occupied 80% of the world’s Bitcoin transactions.
They were lucky and caught up with the big bull market of Bitcoin.
In 2012, the price of a Bitcoin was still $13, and by the end of 2013, the price had exceeded $1,000!
What business can the world achieve such huge profits?Soon countless people flocked into the currency circle, and even Chinese aunts who knew nothing about cryptocurrencies joined. The exchange was as lively as a vegetable market, and the servers were once down, and it took several hours to sell a bitcoin.
It turns out that selling shovels is not profitable, and selling intelligence is not profitable. The most profitable thing is to start a trading market.
In this way, Xu Mingxing and Li Lin earned money that others would never earn in their ten lives in just one year. In 2020, both of them appeared on the Hurun Research Institute’s “Hurun Global Young and Strong People Started from scratch and Rich.List》.
That is really a dividend of an era. If you catch up, you will soar to the sky. If you miss it, you will miss it.
But the good times didn’t last long. The hot Bitcoin situation attracted the attention of regulators and began to evaluate the risks of Bitcoin.
On December 5, 2013, the People’s Bank of China and five ministries issued the “Notice on Preventing Bitcoin Risk”, denied the monetary attributes of Bitcoin and believed that Bitcoin cannot and should not be circulated and used as currency in the market.
The entire market was in a panic, the price of Bitcoin plummeted, and the money of countless speculators was wiped out in an instant.
Two months later, Japan’s Bitcoin trading platform Mt.Gox posted an announcement announcing that it had been hacked, more than 750,000 bitcoins disappeared and the company went bankrupt.
This has caused severe panic around the world. Who knows whether it is a real hacker attack or a “fake hacker, really run away”?
Not long after, the US Butterfly Laboratory was also closed by federal court for “suspected commercial fraud.”
Since then, Bitcoin has entered a long bear market.
Zhao Dong lost his position in leveraged trading and lost 150 million yuan.
Yang Linke sold out most of his Bitcoins.
The roasted cat is missing.
Li Xiaolai also sold his Bitcoin and wanted to open a billiards hall.
In the cold winter, players in the domestic currency circle who are yelling “Bitcoin Faith” often forget that no matter how firm the faith is, it cannot beat reality.
However, in this long bear market, those who can persevere will receive generous returns in the future.
For example, Wu Jihan continued to improve his mining machine and maintained 42.5% of the world’s computing power in the cold winter of Bitcoin, making him famous as the “mining tyrant” of Bitmain later.
For example, Li Lin’s Huobi. Li Lin believes that the policy does deny the monetary attributes of Bitcoin, but does not limit the commodity attributes of Bitcoin. Bitcoin still has investment value. Huobi.com has won two angel round investments.Continue to operate.
There is also Xu Mingxing’s OKCoin, which has launched a trading leverage policy. Simply put, it is to use Bitcoin as a financial product to achieve “currency speculation” by shorting and longing, while OKCoin charges handling fees through RMB withdrawal.
There are also countless dreamers with dreams of making money traveling all over the country, building mines in the grasslands in the northern part of Guizhou and the mountains of Guizhou, and using cheap wind power and hydropower to start the “minting business”.
More than two years later, they finally waited for the praise of fate.
Bitcoin’s underlying technology – blockchain technology, began to attract a lot of attention after 2016. The Russian genius teenager Vitalik Buterin added smart contracts, greatly expanding the application scenarios of blockchain. Blockchain has become the new favorite in the industry and the currency circle.Popular again.
These people who persisted completely turned around in this bull market.
However, it is embarrassing that new technologies are always exploited by scammers at the first time.
What does blockchain bring?What it brings is not the spring of “crypto-anarchists”, but the rampant “altcoins”.
The reason is very simple. There are a large number of people in the market who do not understand “crypto anarchism” and do not understand blockchain, but they understand human nature.
As long as human nature has a greedy side, they can make money by using human nature.
Let’s think about those years, were there any overwhelming advertisements for “blockchain financial management projects”?Recommend blockchain for live broadcasts by celebrities?Some relatives and friends even keep bringing you into the group, saying that blockchain is a new hot spot, so you should get on the bus quickly?
In fact, they just want to cut leeks.
Those dealers who issue messy “altcoins” often register a shell company first, then find an outsourcing team to design a virtual currency, give a name like Dogecoin, Cat Coin, Pig Coin, Eel Coin, Shit Coin, etc., and thenThen, by looking for water troops, asking bigwigs to stand up, live broadcasts, etc., we will blow the project up, and then attract investors to ICO, recharge and transactions, and even crowdfund to buy virtual mining machines.
When the dealer continues to increase the value of the currency and can rise by 10% every day, who can withstand the temptation?Even if someone knows that there are huge risks, he always bets that he is not the last one to pass the flowers by beating the drum. As long as someone buys it, he can always make money.
As a result, it often becomes the leeks harvested by the dealer.
When the dealer harvested almost the same, he directly announced the collapse of the virtual currency, leaving behind a mess.
Then the dealer changed his name and did it again.
What’s more, altcoins have become money laundering channels for telecommunications fraud. As long as the victims throw the money over, they will become altcoins in minutes and then disappear in a corner of the earth.
In this way, the entire Chinese market was torn and messed up.More importantly, this method is completely out of supervision, and cannot be regulated at all, and is very susceptible to artificial manipulation. You think you can achieve financial freedom, but in fact, what you achieve is the financial freedom of others, and you are justA green chive.
In that era of wild growth of altcoins, some people became rich overnight, and more families died. To put it bluntly, every profit in the currency circle is full of blood.
It seems that we can no longer sit idly by and we must take action against Bitcoin.
Why?
Because unlike the United States and Britain, which were founded in financial capital, China is a manufacturing country. A market like virtual currency has little effect on the real economy, national taxation, and promoting consumption, other than stimulating speculation.
On the contrary, this kind of smoky “alien coins” is essentially a capital plunder of the dealer who cuts leeks. It is not only not conducive to common prosperity, but also easily amplifies people’s greed. Once it collapses, it is easy to cause many social problems, and in the end it is the whole people.Come and pay.
At the same time, China itself is a huge energy consumer and bears huge pressure to reduce carbon, but what about the mines?It is the main force of carbon emissions. Some “mines” consume millions of kWh of electricity a day. The “mines” in a certain southwest are equivalent to the total electricity consumption of three cities in a year…
Such a large amount of electricity consumption does not support any physical industry, produce any actual value, nor does it drive employment and taxation, but just creates wealth myths, which instead attracts more people to fly into the flames.
Therefore, on September 4, 2017, seven ministries and commissions jointly issued an announcement announcing a complete ban on ICOs, believing that it poses the risk of illegal fundraising and financial fraud.At the same time, all completed ICO projects are required to return investor funds and clear all ICO-related activities within the specified time.
This is the 94 event that shocked the currency circle.
As soon as the announcement was released, many altcoins were directly reset to zero, and some altcoin exchanges even chose to close them directly.
What’s even more powerful is still coming. On September 14, 2017, the Chinese government officially issued a notice to ban cryptocurrency exchanges, requiring all cryptocurrency exchanges in China to completely clear the Chinese market before September 30.
In this way, not only tc, eth, etc, etc, currencies crashed, but also Bitcoin also collapsed by at least 20%.
So, what should I do in the Chinese currency circle?
escape.
Yang Linke sold “Bitcoin China” to Hong Kong blockchain investment fund.
Li Lin sold all Huobi Global shares to Baiyu Capital.
And what about Xu Mingxing?He is the most successful transformation. OKCoin has gradually transformed into a company for the application and development of blockchain technology, and Xu Mingxing also became the director of the Blockchain Committee of the Beijing Youth Internet Association.
But Xu Mingxing didn’t expect that the world of Bitcoin exchanges will be eaten by his former subordinates in one bite in the future.
This subordinate is Zhao Changpeng, the richest Chinese man who was just released from American prisons at the end of September this year.
Zhao Changpeng is from Jiangsu and was born in 1977. In 1989, his mother took him to queue at the entrance of the Canadian Embassy for 36 hours, and finally got his visa and immigrated to Canada.
Zhao Changpeng’s most intuitive impression of Canada is: I have had fresh milk for the first time!
After graduating from college, Zhao Changpeng first worked at Bloomberg, and later participated in the construction of the cryptocurrency market website Blockchain.info.
By chance, Zhao Changpeng met He Yi.
He Yi, later the No. 1 sister in the currency circle, was originally the host of Travel TV. He joined Xu Mingxing’s OKCoin in 2014 and served as vice president, and was fully responsible for the brand building of OKCoin.
He Yi originally wanted Zhao Changpeng to advertise for OKCoin cheaply on Blockchain.info, but Zhao Changpeng refused He Yi mercilessly.
Man, you have successfully attracted He Yi’s attention.
He Yi felt that Zhao Changpeng did not affect his decision-making because of favors and was “very professional”, so he introduced him to Xu Mingxing and invited him to join OKCoin.
This year, Zhao Changpeng was 37 years old.
Zhao Changpeng, who just joined OKCoin, did a good job and had a lot of his own ideas about the infrastructure, custody and security of on-chain transactions. Moreover, because Zhao Changpeng’s overseas life experience naturally has advantages in developing overseas markets, he quickly grew intoVice President of OKCoin.
At this point, Xu Mingxing, He Yi and Zhao Changpeng became the most popular figures in the 2014 cryptocurrency circle, known as the Iron Triangle.
However, the Iron Triangle is not iron, and Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng quickly had a falling out.
Some people say that the collapse is because there are huge differences in technology and business routes between Xu Mingxing and Zhao Changpeng.
Some people also say that the collapse was because Xu Mingxing discovered that Zhao Changpeng and He Yi had an extramarital affair and dug up his corner together.
Xu Mingxing once posted a Weibo post like this:
“The couple started a business together with me. How can this last? At that time, the company also had clear regulations. When dating internally, one of them must resign. As an executive, she took the lead in breaking the company’s regulations. Now, she can’t show her if she talks about these things.Is her professional ethics or partner spirit? No matter what, without me, she wouldn’t have her current marriage, and she would have to thank me for this.”
The couple obviously implied Zhao Changpeng and He Yi, and Zhao Changpeng was also married at the time.
The matter has reached this level, and it is obvious that everyone can’t work together again. Zhao Changpeng and He Yi have resigned one after another.
Then, in 2017, Zhao Changpeng and He Yi got together again to establish Binance.
At that time, Zhao Changpeng could not have imagined that his Binance would become the world’s largest trading platform in the future.
Perhaps, he should thank the 94 incident.
The 94 incident is a disaster for Bitcoin China, Huobi.com and OKCoin, but for Binance, it is an opportunity to overtake on the curve.
Why?Because Binance registered overseas and the server is also overseas, Zhao Changpeng himself is still a foreigner and has a unique international route. Therefore, when the bosses of other virtual currency exchanges were busy drinking tea, Binance moved the server to Hong Kong, which turned into a blessing in disguise., gained fame.
At that time, 80% of the world’s Bitcoin was controlled by Chinese people, and the 94 world scared the entire country’s Bitcoin holders to hurry to transfer their coins. What pair of domestic markets are full of LSPs when they have experience with OKCoin.Menqing set up a “Binance 101 Girls Group”, each with fair skin, beautiful and long legs. Through some marketing activities of “recharge and give girls private gifts”, it has successfully attracted a large number of male customers, which seems simple.Rough, but really brought huge transactions for Binance.
In this way, the traffic of the three major exchanges, Bitcoin China, Huobi and OKCoin, all went to Binance after the 94 incident, and used Bitcoins controlled by the country to force this trading platform that had just been born for a few months., and has become the world’s virtual currency trading giant.
What is the creation of heroes in the times?This is the times to create heroes!
By 2021, Binance has become the world’s largest virtual currency trading platform. The originally “decentralized” Bitcoin has become “centralized” because of the existence of Binance.
Binance’s daily trading volume can reach $76 billion, and Binance can also obtain a large amount of commission from it. Just like a casino, whether you win or lose, the casino can make money.
Moreover, Binance not only provides trading services, but also issues Binance Coin BNB itself, plus handling fees, currency listing fees, service fees, etc., making a lot of money.
In January 2022, on the Bloomberg Billionaire List, Zhao Changpeng defeated Zhang Yiming, Zhong Shanshan and Zeng Yuqun with a net asset of US$94.1 billion (at the time of approximately RMB 634.8 billion, second only to Musk’s US$102.1 billion).Wait for the big boss to become the “richest Chinese”.
This is the first Chinese in history who has a net worth of nearly 100 billion US dollars, and is also the one with the grayest business.
However, having money does not mean safety. On the contrary, having money may mean insecurity.
After all, since the birth of crypto anarchism, there has always been a sword of Damocles on my head – regulation. From the perspective of maintaining financial security and protecting investors, regulatory authorities in various countries have always been unhappy about Zhao Changpeng. The US economyScholars have listed the “seven deadly sins” of virtual currency, namely concealment, corruption, deception, crime, fraud, price raising, and CZ.
This CZ is Changpeng Zhao.
After leaving China, Zhao Changpeng’s Binance wandered around the world and was warned by financial regulators in many countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore and other countries. Zhao Changpeng didn’t even dare to return home and hid in the UAE for a long time, but he still couldn’t escape in the end.Leave the long-arm jurisdiction of the United States.
In June 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it had filed 13 charges against Changpeng Zhao and Binance.
At this time, no one yelled at the “business environment”. After some rigging, Zhao Changpeng finally pleaded guilty to suspected charges of money laundering, unlicensed remittance, and violation of sanctions, and was forced to pay a fine of US$4.316 billion to settle.
However, even though Zhao Changpeng is so obedient, the United States still refuses to let him go.
After he went to the United States to sign his confession letter, his passport was immediately confiscated, and he was fined another $3 billion.
You see, this is the power of the national-level “pig killing plate”.
In the end, with the efforts of the lawyer, and the collective letters from 161 relatives and friends, including his ex-wife, current wife, life partner, partner, sister and mother, the judge sentenced Zhao Changpeng to four months in prison.
On September 29, 2024, Zhao Changpeng was released from prison.
But, things are not finished yet.
In October 2024, U.S. prosecutors stressed that Binance failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions with Hamas, Al Qaeda, IS extremist organizations, etc.Binance platform also supports the sale of child sexual abuse materials and is also the recipient of a large amount of ransomware stolen money.
In November 2024, Zhao Changpeng was prosecuted again, demanding to recover nearly US$1.8 billion transferred from “based on fraud”.
Zhao Changpeng’s legend continues, and Zhao Changpeng’s lawsuit continues.Obviously, as long as Zhao Changpeng’s wallet is still there, the blood draw in the United States will not end.
The “anarchist cryptocurrency” that seems to challenge the government will collapse in one blow when facing the government.
3
Looking back on the history of the 10-year currency circle, how do you evaluate Bitcoin?
To put it technically, Bitcoin does not matter whether it is good or bad, good or evil, beauty or ugliness. It is just a program, an algorithm, and a series of mysterious codes hidden on the Internet.
To put it in a humanistic sense, Bitcoin is a combination of individualism, liberalism and technological determinism. It is the hope of technological geniuses and madmen on achieving anarchy and utopian society.
However, no matter how great the ideal is, it must be subject to the gravity of reality.
For liberals, Bitcoin is a great ideal for human progress.
For those who are not interested in technology and just want to make money, Bitcoin is just a tool to make money.
Because of the lack of supervision, Bitcoin is always full of ups and downs, and there is always no shortage of wealth-making myths. Due to the bias of survivors, everyone will only pay attention to those who make money.
When someone shows off in his circle of friends: “I made another 100 million yuan by accident.”
When someone takes a photo of the steering wheel with half of the Maserati logo exposed and then matches it with “The God will pay off”.
When more people show off a group of young models on the yacht.
Who can restrain his desires?
If you are a person, you have desires, and Bitcoin can arouse the most greedy glutton in people’s hearts. You can’t stand it, and I can’t stand it either.
Luo Jinhai, the founder of Bixu.com, once had a very vivid metaphor:
Bitcoin is the supreme ring that governs the rings. It bewitches the mind. Those who wear the rings will eventually become slaves to the demon king Sauron.
In reality, those who bring Bitcoin rings will become slaves to this ring unless they have a very strong heart.
As a technology created by “crypto-anarchists”, Bitcoin is neutral in itself, but when technology and reality are combined, problems will inevitably arise when encountering difficult-to-break human nature.
Satoshi Nakamoto can collide with the unique hash value of 4.4 million trillion, but he cannot calculate the madness of human nature.
When greed in human nature distorts an originally neutral thing, this kind of thing itself is no longer important. There were tulips back then, but now there are Bitcoins. There is nothing wrong with tulips and Bitcoins, but only human nature is wrong.
Therefore, when human nature cannot withstand the negative feedback from technology, regulatory intervention is very necessary.
After all, Bitcoin cannot satisfy hunger or circulation, and there is no currency anchor behind it. In addition to consuming a lot of energy to create wealth-creating myths, it only brings disaster.
Why are Chinese so keen on the currency circle?
Why are 70% of the world’s Bitcoin mined by Chinese people?
Why do Chinese control 50% of the world’s Bitcoin market and most of the trading platforms?
Look at the stories of the generation of token circle masters in the article who flew over the top of the mountain in a flash but fell from the altar in a flash. There may be an answer in our hearts.
Don’t test human nature with Bitcoin, human nature will never stand the test.
