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The crypto world never curtains: Why BTC is the starting point, not the end point
Donkeys Always Keep Turning in Circles, Mill Owners Are Always Creating New Opportunities
Regarding the meme coin craze, there's an interesting perspective worth exploring: believe in the power of traffic, but don't worship its wisdom.
Thinking deeper along this line reveals a bigger question—has the crypto world truly ushered in the "end of history"?
This question isn't new. At the end of the last century, Japanese-American scholar Fukuyama proposed the "End of History" theory, believing humanity had reached its final stage. Similar sentiments are often heard in the crypto space: no more cryptocurrencies after BTC, no more public chain smart contracts after ETH, no new tricks after the last meme wave...
But all these judgments are wrong. Completely wrong.
BTC is not the end of crypto history; it is the true beginning.
Token Flooding, Opportunities Actually Increasing?
Starting from the 2017 frenzy. Back then, tokens were scarce, hot money was overflowing, and supply-demand imbalance created a bubble.
Fast forward to now. After iterations like ERC-20, inscriptions, and zero-threshold token issuance platforms, the supply of tokens has exploded. Thousands of new tokens emerge daily. Logically, the market should be saturated, right?
No. Quite the opposite.
Whenever people feel there's no "room for innovation," smarter minds find new ways, creating stories of sudden wealth. Why? Because tokens have never been scarce. The only truly scarce thing is—opportunities to make money.
Hot money isn't chasing tokens; it's chasing scarcity. Chasing that ever-elusive dream of getting rich overnight.
Endless Game
Imagine a donkey with its eyes covered, in front of it hangs a piece of hay, forever out of reach. To get it, the donkey keeps running in circles, turning the mill beneath its feet.
This is the truth of the market.
The donkey represents hot money, the hay represents opportunities to make money, and the mill represents various new gameplay— from ICOs to DeFi, from NFTs to meme coins, and to the next new thing that hasn't appeared yet.
You can never say the current mill is the last one. Because—
The mill exists because of the donkey, not the donkey because of the mill.
As long as there is a donkey pulling the mill, clever mill owners (market makers) will keep creating new mills. This is an endless cycle. The scarcity of making money is almost eternal, so the pursuit is endless.
The relationship between retail investors ("leeks") and market makers is also like this. It's not that market makers exist first, then retail investors come; it's because retail investors are willing to be "harvested" that market makers keep appearing.
Cold, Hard Reality
But there's a cruel part to this game: the dreams of making money chased by hot money often end in losses and being wiped out.
Donkeys have limited lives, but the mills have endless variations. Using a finite life to chase infinite opportunities is destined to end that way.
Ultimately, only three types of people truly make big money—the owners of the mills, the orchestrators (market makers), and the platforms that create dreams.
This isn't pessimism about the crypto space. On the contrary, it shows that opportunities always exist. The question is: are you chasing opportunities, or are you becoming someone else's opportunity?