Trading Volume surges, market enthusiasm continues to be the focus of attention.

On the weekend, I整理书房 and found a Nokia E71 that I used many years ago from a dusty corner of a drawer.

All-metal body, classic QWERTY full keyboard, heavy in hand, all filled with lost youth.


I even took the charger with great interest to see if it could still power on, reminiscing about the feeling of staying up late chatting back in the day.

The moment the screen lit up, my heart did skip a beat, but after playing with it for less than five minutes, the novelty wore off.

Besides being able to make a call and send a message, it really can't do much else in this era.

This feeling resembles the sudden violent surge of tokens like Filecoin (FIL) in the "old listing sector" that I've seen in the past few days.

Doubling in two days, the candlestick chart looks like a launch, and the group immediately became lively with various slogans such as "value return" and "the storage sector is about to explode" being shouted out.

Many people who missed out on the previous mainstream hotspots seem to have found a lifeline at this moment, rubbing their fists and preparing to rush in for a big battle.

Whenever this happens, I always have the habit of splashing cold water on myself first, then sitting down to calculate three accounts.

The first transaction is the "money account."


Looking in the rearview mirror, those who bought at the lowest point and sold at the highest point truly made a fortune.

But this is a typical "survivorship bias."

The reality is that the vast majority of funds only rush in after the second large bullish candlestick is formed, and their costs are sky-high.

This abrupt and violent surge is essentially a "musical chairs" game; when the music stops, someone has to stand guard.

The large investors use a seemingly reasonable "hook"—for example, the recent popularity of storage chips and solid-state batteries in the A-shares market—to ride this wave, allowing them to lift an old cryptocurrency that has been dormant for a long time with a small amount of capital, clearing out the trapped positions above.

The purpose is not to liberate all those who are trapped, but to attract new liquidity in order to sell their own.

You think it's a pie falling on your face, but it's more likely that you're lifting someone else's sedan chair.

Calculating the monetary account, the "value-for-money ratio" of this transaction is actually very low.

The second item is the "emotional account."


For those old friends who have held FIL all the way from the peak in 2021 to now, the "emotional value" brought by this rebound is immense.

It feels like a shot of adrenaline, allowing people to temporarily forget the painful decline of the past two years, akin to "boiling a frog in warm water," and reigniting hope for "breaking even or even making a profit."

But hope is precisely the most expensive commodity in the market.

This sudden sense of happiness can severely disrupt your decision-making system.

You might start to wonder, is this the beginning of a new bull market?

Is the storage sector going to take over from AI and become the next main narrative?

Under the influence of such emotions, you who originally planned to "get out once you break even" may end up thinking "let's hold on a bit longer and see if it can reach the previous high," ultimately missing the best opportunity to exit and going through the entire process of "taking the elevator" again.

For newcomers, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is the biggest enemy.

Watching others make money while you lose is even more painful; this emotion can cause you to ignore all risks and plunge in with your eyes closed.


Calculating emotional costs, the fleeting pleasure you pursue may result in a longer period of suffering in the future.

The third transaction, and the most important one, is called "opportunity cost account."

Your funds are limited, and your time is too.

What are you actually giving up when you choose to invest your money in the narrative of FIL, which is like "old trees producing new blossoms"?

You have given up on researching and planning those emerging projects that may represent the direction of the future.

Every cycle rotation in the market has a main narrative. In 2020, it was DeFi, in 2021, it was GameFi and NFTs; in this round, concepts like AI + Web3 and DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) are clearly more imaginative. Funds have "intelligence"; they flow like water, always seeking the lowest and most promising areas. The explosive rebound of old coins often does not imply a disruptive change in their fundamentals, but rather that the mainstream market narrative has temporarily cooled down, and some speculative funds have nowhere to go, so they choose to stir things up in these "historical relics", which we call "filling the pit market". If you waste your precious bullets on "filling the pit", it means you might miss the real opportunity to "build a big building". This calculation of opportunity cost often results in the greatest losses.

Clarifying these three accounts, let's return to the first principles and take a look at the decentralized storage sector itself. The blueprint drawn by Filecoin back in the day was nothing short of grand: to build a distributed data storage network that anyone can participate in, challenging the monopoly of centralized giants like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. This story is very appealing, but the reality is harsh. Years have passed, and its actual application scenarios are still very limited; the vast majority of storage space is filled with "garbage data" and redundant backups piled up to earn block rewards. In terms of user experience, access speed, data reliability, and overall cost, it is still far from challenging AWS.

The value of a project or a sector is assessed in the short term by narrative, in the medium term by consensus, and in the long term by its implementation. The narrative of decentralized storage has been discussed for too long, and the market is somewhat aesthetically fatigued. Its fundamentals—namely, the actual commercial implementation and cash flow capturing ability—have not seen any substantial improvement with this price doubling. In simple terms, it is a typical case of "the goods do not match the board." The short-term surge in price has seriously decoupled from its intrinsic value, turning into a pure game of chips and emotions.

Therefore, FIL has doubled this time thanks to the "favorable wind" from the A-shares, much like my Nokia E71 in the drawer, which suddenly powers on at a special moment, making you feel nostalgic. But you would never give up your iPhone just because it can power on, and use it as your main device again. Its moment of glory is likely just a brief flashback. This kind of market situation is more suited as a "thermometer" to observe market conditions and see how far speculative sentiment has gone, rather than treating it as a "rice bowl" that can be heavily invested in.

Occasionally coming out to jump a little, to prove that one is still "alive", perhaps is the fate of this kind of old projects. But for us ordinary investors, distinguishing what is the true wave of the era and what are the shells left on the beach after the wave recedes may be a more important ability than seizing every rebound. Let's encourage and caution each other.