24-year-old Yang Yi is the most ordinary kind of county youth. After dropping out of high school, he followed his parents to a construction site in the city. He might work for more than ten years in this way, save money to build a house in his hometown, marry a wife and have children, and then return to the construction site to continue working, just like his father.
But the emergence of virtual currency is the biggest variable in his life.
Yang Yi follows the people on the Internet to speculate in bitcoins, playing contracts. He can use leverage to "buy coins" and make profits by predicting the rise and fall of the currency. For Yang Yi who does not have enough capital, this is a game with lower threshold, but the risks and opportunities are equally great.
Search for "contract" on the Internet, and there will always be a warning that "you must die if you play a contract". Even so, there are those who are feverishly eager to pan for gold in the game of fortune. Such as Yang Yi. The longing for "getting rich" is like a bottomless vortex, sucking him into the currency circle time and time again.
In the past, he had neither the ability nor the luck to catch up with any express train of wealth of the times. Now, he is obsessed with this game of small and big, thinking that he can finally grasp the jumping pole to leverage wealth and achieve a leap in class, although it is actually a sickle to harvest him.
1. **** "New World"
Recalling the first time he clicked on the online exchange of virtual currency, Yang Yi thought of the fable of Pandora's Box. After opening the "box" of virtual currency, his life fell into a numb cycle: speculating in coins, owing online loans, and going to construction sites to pay off debts.
But at the time, Yang Yi thought he had discovered a "new continent". In the derivative community of the exchange, hundreds of people are active every day, where people post orders, exchange experience in currency speculation, or hold classes to teach experience. Yang Yi is like a brave man who has just stepped into an adventure game, receiving "novice tutorials" in the community.
That was 2019. In February, the valuation of Bitcoin was still US$3,500. By the time he entered in June, the highest point had exceeded US$10,000. The value of that invisible currency quadrupled in just four months.
The currency-holding party holding Bitcoin has appreciated in this wave of spring breeze; some contract players, through correct judgments on the ups and downs, have also doubled their small fortunes. They posted screenshots of their enviable assets in the community, complimented each other and asked for advice in the comments. Looking at the dizzying zeros in those screenshots, Yang Yi felt for the first time that wealth is so close to people.
Yang Yi was secretly delighted, feeling that he had found a shortcut that was easier to make money. More importantly, it gave him hope of leaving the construction site.
Yang Yi dropped out of school during the winter vacation of the second year of high school and went to the construction site where his father worked. His family is located in a small town in Liupanshui, Guizhou, where people like him are not uncommon. When he was still in junior high school, many students of the same grade had dropped out of school. There are not many places to go: wandering on the street; or, leave the small town to find a job in the county; if you go further afield, you usually put on a hard hat and devote yourself to the infrastructure construction of large, medium and small cities.
Construction workers work very hard, and sometimes, they need to face more dangers. In the first year he went to the construction site, his father fell from a shelf two or three meters high, suffered a comminuted fracture of his knee, and lay in bed for two weeks. Because he didn't buy insurance, the foreman only paid 20,000 yuan for medical expenses and settled the matter hastily.
This caused Yang Yi to have a conflict with life on the construction site. After coming into contact with the currency circle, he fantasized that he could own several times his assets overnight like those players in the community. In this way, he can get rid of that world full of dust and noise, and finally be able to unload the burden of life on his parents.
A shelf on a construction site with no protection around it. There are two people standing on it, the one on the right is Yang Yi's father
He tried to invest for the first time, testing the water with a hundred yuan, playing with the contract.
Contract transactions correspond to spot transactions. If you have enough principal, you can buy currency directly and wait quietly for appreciation. This is a relatively safe way of playing, but for Yang Yi, it is too slow to make a profit by depositing coins, and it also needs funds. Young people like him who have no money in their hands are directly blocked from this way of playing.
The contract is similar to the futures in the stock market, earning income by predicting the rise and fall of the price of the currency. What's more, with leverage, it can double the principal invested, thereby doubling the return. The principal is 10,000, with 100 times the leverage to buy bitcoins to increase the price. When the price of bitcoins rises by 1%, the principal will be doubled by 100%, and the direct profit will be 10,000.
But if you buy in the wrong direction, the loss is also 100%. As long as the price of Bitcoin falls by 1%, the 10,000 principal will disappear without a trace. Losing all the principal like this is called a "liquidation".
In the currency circle, many people have frequently liquidated their positions due to market turmoil, and eventually lost all their money. But there are also people who rely on operation and courage, soar under the blessing of high leverage, become rich overnight, and become legends.
**Second, **Dead Before Dawn
Those stories in the contract market that are small and big are the beginning of Yang Yi's obsession with speculating in coins.
During the day, he worked with his master on the construction site, turned on his mobile phone when he was free, and followed active veterans to learn the ups and downs curves and judge the future trend of currencies. In the evening, he still does not rest after taking a shower, and conducts contract transactions on the exchange. First exchange cash into stable currency, fill in the leverage multiple, and then judge the rise and fall, buy or sell. Every choice is related to the outcome of the money: doubling or liquidation?
The ending is often "explosion". Before this, the platform will warn in advance that if the deposit is not added in time, the principal will be "exploded"; and after paying this deposit, it is difficult to guarantee the next change in the curve, and it is often lost together with the principal in the end.
The email notification received by Yang Yi after his position was liquidated (that is, he was forced to close his position)
After losing the first few hundred yuan, Yang Yi was not reconciled, thinking that his skills were not good enough. He is more cautious in his operations, but his desire is increasing. The money invested has increased from several hundred to one thousand, and the unit of leverage has increased from ten to one hundred. The money in the bank card decreased, and the numbers in the trading software appeared, increased, and returned to zero again.
He was almost pushed away by the contract deal. Every night, people are like walking a tightrope hanging in the air, and a heart goes up and down with the shaking of the curve. The real-time beating of assets made him unable to sleep with his eyes closed, and he would get up to pick up his mobile phone after lying down for a few minutes.
In less than a month of speculating in coins, he lost all the savings of more than 40,000 yuan he had saved from working part-time for two years. I owed another 60,000 online loans, and finally stopped, because I couldn't afford the money to enter the market again. At the end of the loss, Yang Yi didn't really feel it. The only thing that made him not reconciled was that he lost the next chance to enter the game, the possibility of "earning money back".
Yang Yi finally understands what some contract players call "death before dawn". The money he invested almost never lasts overnight. Once he was so tired that he held his mobile phone and fell asleep. When he woke up the next day, the money was gone, only a text message "You have liquidated your position" was left in the mailbox.
He makes very little money. Even if you make a profit, you are always waiting for it to continue to rise, and finally wait for a curve change, and the money will explode with interest.
Now, Yang Yi understands that the contract is a gamble belonging to the bottom speculators. Rich people can spend a lot of spare money to invest, and play slowly with small leverage. And they can only drive dangerous multiples, take deposits, living expenses, and even rely on loans to fight for the possibility of "wealth freedom". This continent is not the profit-seeking field he imagined.
In various communities in the currency circle, Yang Yi met many people who were torn between life and desire. Some people asked for help in it, asking where to go after the loss; some wrote long articles, reflecting on how they got to where they are today. There are also some people who disappeared after leaving a message about jumping off the building. He didn't know if these people had waited for their own dawn.
**Third, **The Only Straw
If he had money, a stable job, and a family of his own, Yang Yi felt that he would never touch the currency circle again. But he has nothing, speculation is like the match in a fairy tale book, he can't help but strike it again and again.
This young man fighting in the currency circle has always been an image of a good boy in the eyes of his parents: safe, talk less, and do things safely. The only time he didn't obey the adults was when he insisted on going to the county town to study in high school.
In their high school, about half of them can go to college, mostly two or three. He was ranked in the lower middle of the class. If he persisted until the college entrance examination, he might be able to pass the third exam.
But just half a year into his studies, he wanted to drop out of school. It had nothing to do with grades, but simply felt that "studying is useless". He posted his thoughts on Baidu Zhizhi, and was persuaded by a netizen, so he continued to study for another year. In the second year of high school, I dropped out of school. "There are many students around me who have entered three books, and there is no difference in the end."
In a small county town, the trajectory of life seems to be predictable from birth.
The most direct reference is his own father. After graduating from junior high school, his parents went to the construction site in Wenzhou, and he went to the county alone to live on campus. The construction site can earn 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a year. In order to make a living, leaving home to work in the surrounding big cities is an extremely common choice in the local area. Children in many counties were separated from their parents earlier and became "left-behind children".
But Yang Yi longed for a warm and stable home, and did not want to repeat the same mistakes. After working on the construction site for half a year, he began to look for opportunities to return to the county seat. First he went back for a medical examination for conscription, but he was found to have "elbow hyperextension" and was dismissed. Then I found a job in a karaoke bar in the county seat, but the salary was only 2,000 a month. In the end, he had to go back to the construction site.
Working in a karaoke hall in the county seat, Yang Yi described himself as "tired of this dark life"
Life has come to a dead end: on the construction site like my parents, I can’t be with my family; if I want to go back to the county to start a family, it’s obviously hard to afford a monthly salary of 2,000; Young people open to technology.
Lack, despair, and the refusal to have nothing breed great desires. Despite the continuous loss of principal and loans, Yang Yi still couldn't stop his fantasy of getting rich.
In the summer of 2021, Yang Yi speculated in coins for the second time and lost more than 20,000 yuan. This made him fearful, "I feel that no matter how I play, I will lose." He deleted all his friends in the currency circle and trading software, and determined not to speculate in currencies anymore.
At that time, he did not expect that shortly after he quit the circle, the legend was born.
In the currency circle, almost everyone knows "Liangxi". The name is bound together with three numbers: 519, 1000, 1000.
"519" refers to the virtual currency plunge event on May 19, 2021. According to data, the total amount of liquidation on that day reached 6.28 billion US dollars, or about 40.4 billion yuan. On this day, while countless people abandoned their warehouses to escape, Liangxi took a principal of 1,000 yuan and used high leverage to roll over the position to 10 million yuan. He was 17 years old at the time.
No one thought that it would be a child who caught this historic crash. The initial capital is 1,000 yuan, which is the "start threshold" that almost everyone can reach. Entering the arena with a thousand yuan in hand and becoming a multi-millionaire, Liangxi realized this almost absurd possibility.
Although Liangxi's tens of millions of income has now turned into liabilities, at least in that year, he got everything. Suddenly rich, traffic, the founders of several trading software gave Liangxi dream funds one after another, rewarding him with "the more frustrated and courageous the spirit".
In one stimulation after another, Yang Yi's determination kept loosening.
**Fourth, **jump pole and sickle
Last year, he came to Shanghai to take out food with his friends, also for money. He heard that "it can earn 20,000 yuan a month." This is the first big city he has been to since he left the county, and in this city, delivery people run around like bees.
Yang Yi took it when he was delivering food in Shanghai. He felt that the people in the photo were like ants, "each busy and orderly"
He came in February, couldn't run fast enough, and didn't make much money. I was banned in early April, and ten people in a room robbed meituan from morning till night. After the riders unblocked in advance, he lived in the bridge hole with his friends and delivered food all over the city. In May, he was familiar with the business and rarely overtimed. In June, he saved some money.
Desire may be found at this time. "Go there and see a richer life." Yang Yi paused, "I feel that the gap is too big." Shanghai made him yearn for a better life. Running takeaways and working on construction sites wears out his body, not for a long time. plan. Looking around at the paths around him, there was only Chaobi, a jumping pole that he could hold in his hand.
In late June, Yang Yi started his own way of speculating in coins for the third time. I invested 5,000 on the first day, but failed. He still has the 20,000 yuan he saved from doing food delivery, which is all his savings.
For money, he ran around during the lockdown period. He couldn't go back to the rental house. He and his rider friends spent the night in parks or bridge holes. For more money, Yang Yi gritted his teeth and threw them in. The speed of squandering exceeded his own expectations. After two days, he only lost money for meals.
Yang Yi's car is full of supplies waiting to be delivered
He was very sad, and he planned to stop here, but he felt that "if we want to do it, it will be big", so his sadness turned into a kind of determination. It happened that the amount of an online loan software in his mobile phone suddenly skyrocketed. He first borrowed 50,000, and then borrowed 30,000. It was hard to stop when the matter developed here. He continued to download other online loan software, and finally borrowed more than 130,000 yuan.
On July 1, Yang Yi spent all the money. At 10:30 in the morning, he posted the word "waste" in his circle of friends, announcing the end of this game.
During this period, he thought about stopping, but in the end he was persuaded by himself, thinking that there was no way out. He is always afraid that there will be big fluctuations in the next second after he closes his hand, and he will regret it if he closes his hand. It is better to bet the hope of making a comeback in the next billing, until the end of the fight, even the 700 yuan on hand for food, he Will also put in.
"I thought I had nothing, so I wanted to fight." He said, "The less I have that opportunity, the more frantically I want to create opportunities for myself."
When currency speculation becomes a wealth game, the motivation of most people is to hope to get rich through it. They don't know what the Lightning Network is, the fork of Bitcoin, and the acronym for ICO. These ordinary investors who failed to understand the essence of the blockchain flocked into the market, becoming the most primitive fighters in the "ring" of currency speculation, and also the persecuted anonymously boosting the appreciation of Bitcoin.
After many liquidations, Yang Yi now admits that ordinary people like him entering the market are just leeks waiting to be cut. "We all know we are leeks, but we still want to grab meat from lions." He laughed to himself. "If you can't grab meat, soup is fine."
**Five, **Where to find a way out
Last year he owed a loan of 130,000 yuan, and the collector called his home. Only then did the parents know that he had embarked on another track in an invisible place.
For this small town family, 130,000 yuan in debt is not easy. Yang Yi felt uncomfortable when his mother cried for him for the first time. He followed his parents' advice and returned to work at the construction site with peace of mind. His family raised enough money for him and the debt was released.
But Yang Yi didn't want to stay on the construction site all the time. It has been six or seven years since he dropped out of school, and the life on the construction site alone has occupied his youth for nearly five years.
"The construction site is too dangerous." He sighed as he said. The year before last, he worked on a construction site contracted by a pair of brothers. One minute, the foreman's brother was still chatting with him, and the next minute, the wooden plank on the tower crane slipped off and fell on the other party's head, and he was gone. The terrifyingly tall tower cranes, accident-prone trucks, and the steel bars and potholes on the construction site all made him want to escape here.
In his diary, Yang Yi wrote:
Is the construction site my destination in this life? No, I will come out again after I recover from my injury. Even if I'm covered in bruises, I don't want to live a life where I can see the end at a glance.
This year he is twenty-four years old, and he plans to work on the construction site until the Chinese New Year. As for the plans for next year, Yang Yi counts out for himself on his fingers: construction site, entering the factory, and running takeaways. "But all three are not what I want."
A while ago, when Yang Yi got off work from construction, he looked up and saw the rainbow. This was the first time he was so close to the rainbow.
At the beginning of last year, he paid 500 tuition fees and entered a study group for self-examination specialists. The teacher sent down the online class video and asked them to use their free time to study, and check in the group after finishing.
Yang Yi persisted for half a month. He didn't get off work until ten o'clock in order to take out food, and he learned at twelve o'clock, and often fell asleep in the teacher's endless words because he was too tired. He still gave up later, feeling that he was not the kind of person who had "free time". I can't remember whether it was Ma Yuan or Mao Gai for the ideological and political course that I didn't finish.
For him, the best days may stay in his student days. When he was in high school, a friend lent him a palm-sized book about Bill Gates. Yang Yi put it under his pillow and read dozens of pages every night. On the eve of dropping out of high school to go to the construction site in the second year of high school, his roommates joked to him, saying that you want to be Bill Gates?
At that time, he thought that the future was full of opportunities just like those written in business books. After coming out, I found that the world faced by a young man with no education and no skills is full of difficulties. Maintaining the state of being alive is already everything for many people.
When I was doing food delivery in Shanghai, there was a brother rider who was ten years older than Yang Yi. He heard that he was playing in the currency circle, so he came to talk to him. My eldest brother traded in stocks when he was young and lost 400,000 yuan, and he is still paying off his debts. "These things are not something we can play with." He said to Yang Yi, "We only know how to throw money into it."
But Yang Yi is not a person who will be reconciled to this. When asked whether he would speculate in coins again, he hesitated for a while, and said with a little helplessness that if he had the opportunity, he would certainly still play. On his current desktop, there is still an exclusive category of currency circle software, which contains some exchanges and information software, a total of ten. The little hope in my heart can never be given up.
