Back in 2015, I was still taking computer science classes at university and first heard about Bitcoin from an upperclassman. At that time, the price was just over 2,000 yuan. Out of curiosity—I used the 8,000 yuan I earned from side jobs to buy my first Bitcoin. Three months later, it more than doubled in value, and that heartbeat-accelerating feeling really kept me awake at night. It seemed like making money was that simple.

Here’s the problem. Greed is like poison. Later, I spent an entire year obsessively chasing after various altcoins claiming "hundredfold returns," with only one thought in my mind—winning big money. In 2017, I bet all my money on a "dream coin" that sounded ridiculous. It increased eightfold in a week, and my account balance skyrocketed.

I was convinced it would rise a hundred times, and I wouldn’t sell even if I died. But what happened? The project team vanished overnight, and I lost my 50,000 yuan principal just like that.

That was my first liquidation. Sitting in my rented small room, I felt ice-cold—it's not about being upset over the money, but about being toyed with by the market in a very real way. That helplessness was indescribable. The market taught me a lesson in the most straightforward way: money earned by luck will eventually be lost through knowledge.

The turning point came during the 2019 bear market. That’s when I truly woke up—I wasn’t investing, I was gambling. So I decided to start over and set three strict rules for myself.

First, only invest in coins whose underlying logic I can understand. I spent two months studying smart contracts and distributed ledgers, flipping through the Ethereum white paper until I knew it inside out. Eventually, I discovered a painful truth: most people haven’t even read the project white paper before blindly following the trend to buy coins. They’re rushing in with their eyes closed.