At offline preaching for slow fish, I found that a lot of on-the-ground sales situations are the same. Some team leads look for projects—really, they’ve gotten used to taking advantage and they come in asking for an “airdrop” and a commission right away. The money comes from the sheep—their projects set aside 20%–30%. These people probably have already suffered losses themselves, so they choose projects with the mindset of trying to get it back by deceiving others.

All gold-standard projects are doomed. Investors bet big to beat small, and the leaders’ profits come from the principal of people they’ve tricked.

There are too many trader brothers around me. If you can make more than 100% on a line withdrawal, then I’d say you’ve already done a great job.

But in Hangzhou now, most of them are old hands too, just like Shenzhen a few years ago. The mindset of the leaders is also mostly clear about what they’re doing: borrowing influence and leverage, turning their own network connections into cash, and cutting down their own network’s “grass.”

Maybe after the Industrial Revolution, everyone can finally eat their fill. These capital pools are more like siphoning operations with extremely high extraction, opaque and unfair—like big gambling tables, big Texas hold ’em, big Guandan/掼蛋. These people play and play happily. And their investment mindset is getting better too: more and more projects blow up now, but very few project teams end up being held accountable. Even when they lose money, they can’t be bothered to pursue rights—they just want to quickly get it back from elsewhere. Even “Uncle Hat” (law enforcement) is lazier about dealing with it.