Honestly, most people in crypto don't understand one simple thing — the price you see on the screen is not your money. It's a number. Period. The exchange is just a middleman that earns on commissions. You're not selling tokens to the exchange, and the exchange isn't buying from you. You're trading with each other through their platform. And here’s where it gets interesting — if you want to exit, there must be someone willing to buy at the exact price you're offering. And there need to be quite a few such people at the same time. At the top, not everyone can exit simultaneously. It's mathematically impossible. Even gold would drop if 80% of people in profit decided to sell. And altcoins? Even more so. Especially small projects with a tiny market cap. The portfolio shows millions — you click sell, but there aren't enough buy orders. A more realistic scenario: you invested 10K, it grew to 100K, but you can't sell at the market price. The first serious buy order is minus 30%. Or there's simply no liquidity, and you're just watching a chart that did 30X. History has many such cases. Bitconnect in 2018 — people saw six-figure numbers on the dashboard, then the system collapsed, liquidity disappeared, and the price dropped 99%. Paper wealth just evaporated. Terra and LUNA in 2022 — many were paper millionaires before the death spiral. When the crash started, the supply flooded the order book. There were no buyers to absorb the sell-off. Squid Game Token in 2021 — the price skyrocketed by thousands of percent, but people technically couldn't sell due to smart contract restrictions. Liquidity was drained. Millions were left only as screenshots. And what about private rounds and VC projects? People often hold tokens with a "price" 10–50 times higher than their initial investment. But the token isn't listed yet, there's vesting, no secondary market, or OTC is very thin. On paper, they're millionaires, but in practice, there's no liquidity. A similar situation with PI Network — for years, users "mined" tokens. At some points, IOU versions of PI traded on certain exchanges at high prices. But the mainnet wasn't open for free trading for a long time, the token wasn't globally liquid, and the supply was huge compared to actual demand. People on paper had tens of thousands or even "millions" of dollars worth of IOU PI, but there was no deep liquidity market. Without a buyer, there's no realization. Here's the honest truth: price does not equal liquidity, market cap does not equal the money you can access, portfolio value does not equal realized profit. If 80% of holders try to sell, the price will collapse. This even applies to gold. And small altcoins — even more so. You're a millionaire only when you lock in profit, convert it into a stable asset, or withdraw into fiat. Everything else is just a number on the screen. Trading altcoins is not about friendship in Telegram groups of 3–10K participants. It's not a place where you'll find a "friend for life." Many cycles you'll go through alone, thinking for yourself, and that's how you'll win. A solo player in the trenches — that's who survives the crypto market.