Getting rich overnight is just a fantasy
Yang Yi, 24, is an ordinary young man from a county town. After dropping out of high school, he followed his parents to a construction site in the city. He might work there for more than a decade, save money to build a house in his hometown, get married and have children, and then return to the construction site to continue working, just like his father.
But the emergence of virtual currency was the biggest change in his life.
Yang Yi followed people online to speculate in Bitcoin, playing with contracts, which allowed him to use leverage to "buy coins" and gain profits by predicting the rise and fall of the currency. For Yang Yi, who did not have enough capital, this was a way to play with a lower threshold, but the risks and opportunities were equally great.
Searching for "contract" on the Internet will always bring up the warning that "playing with contracts means death." Even so, there are still people who are fanatically eager to make money in this wealth game. For example, Yang Yi. His longing for "getting rich quickly" is like a bottomless whirlpool that sucks him into the cryptocurrency circle again and again.
In the past, he had neither the ability nor the luck to catch any of the wealth express trains of the times. Now, he is addicted to this game of risking a small fortune, thinking that he can finally grasp the lever to pry open wealth and achieve social class leap, although it is actually a sickle to harvest him.
"New World"
Recalling the first time he clicked into an online cryptocurrency exchange, Yang Yi thought of the fable of Pandora's Box. After opening the "box" of cryptocurrency, his life fell into a numb cycle: speculating in cryptocurrencies, owing online loans, and going to construction sites to pay off debts.
But at that time, Yang Yi thought he had discovered a "new world". In the derivative community of the exchange, hundreds of people are active every day, posting orders, exchanging experiences in cryptocurrency trading, or teaching courses to share experiences. Yang Yi is like a brave man who has just entered an adventure game, receiving a "beginner's tutorial" in the community.
That was 2019. In February, the valuation of Bitcoin was still $3,500. By the time he entered the market in June, the peak had risen to over $10,000. The invisible currency tripled in value in just four months.
The Bitcoin hoarders saw their assets appreciate in this wave of spring breeze; some contract players also doubled their money by correctly judging the ups and downs. They posted screenshots of their enviable assets in the community, and complimented and asked for advice from each other in the comments. Yang Yi looked at the dizzying number of zeros in those screenshots, and for the first time felt that wealth was so close to people.
Yang Yi was secretly delighted, thinking that he had found a shortcut to make money more easily. More importantly, this gave him hope of leaving the construction site.
Yang Yi dropped out of school during the winter break of his second year of high school and went to work at his father's construction site. His family lives in a small town in Liupanshui, Guizhou, where people like him are not uncommon. When he was still in junior high school, many of his classmates had already dropped out of school. There were not many places to go: wandering on the streets; or leaving the town to find a job in the county town; if they go further, they usually put on a safety helmet and devote themselves to the infrastructure business of large, medium and small cities.
The work of construction workers is very hard, and sometimes they have to face more dangers. In the first year he went to the construction site, his father fell from a two- or three-meter-high shelf, and his knee was shattered and he lay in bed for two weeks. Because he didn't buy insurance, the foreman only paid 20,000 yuan for medical expenses and hastily settled the matter.
This made Yang Yi feel resistant to the life on the construction site. After coming into contact with the cryptocurrency circle, he fantasized that he could also have several times more assets overnight like those players in the community. In this way, he could get rid of the world full of dust and noise, and finally be able to unload the burden of life on his parents.
The scaffolding on the construction site has no protection around it. There are two people standing on it. The one on the right is Yang Yi's father.
He tried to invest for the first time, taking a hundred dollars to test the waters and playing with contracts.
Contract trading corresponds to spot trading. If you have enough capital, you can directly buy the currency and wait for appreciation. This is a safer way to play, but for Yang Yi, it is too slow to make a profit by hoarding coins, and it also requires funds. Young people like him who have no money are directly blocked from this way of playing.
Contracts are similar to futures in the stock market, and they earn profits by predicting the rise and fall of currency prices. More importantly, with leverage, it can double the principal invested, and thus double the profits. With a principal of 10,000, and a 100x leverage to buy Bitcoin price increases, when the price of Bitcoin rises by 1%, the principal will double by 100%, and you will directly make a profit of 10,000.
But if you buy in the wrong direction, the loss is also 100%. If the price of Bitcoin drops by 1%, the principal of 10,000 will disappear without a trace. Losing all the principal like this is called "margin call".
In the cryptocurrency world, many people have had their positions liquidated frequently due to market turmoil, and eventually lost all their money. However, some people have relied on their operations and courage to soar with the blessing of high leverage, becoming rich overnight and becoming a legend.
Die before dawn
Those stories of making a small fortune with a small investment in the contract market were the beginning of Yang Yi's fascination with cryptocurrency trading.
During the day, he worked on the construction site with his master. Whenever he had free time, he would turn on his phone and learn from the active veterans to read the rising and falling curves and judge the future trend of the currency. At night, he did not rest after washing up, and traded contracts in the exchange. First, he exchanged cash for stablecoins, filled in the leverage multiple, and then judged the rise and fall, whether to buy or sell. Every choice was related to the outcome of the money: double or liquidation?
The ending is often a "margin call". Before this, the platform will warn in advance that if you do not add margin in time, the principal will be "blown up"; and after paying the margin this time, it is difficult to guarantee the next change of the curve, and in the end it is often lost together with the principal.
Email notification received after Yang Yi's position was liquidated (i.e. forced liquidation)
After losing the first few hundred yuan, Yang Yi was unwilling to accept it, thinking that his skills were not good enough. He operated more cautiously, but his desire was growing. He increased the amount of money he invested from a few hundred to a thousand, and the leverage multiple unit from ten to a hundred. The money in the bank card became less, and the numbers in the trading software appeared, increased, and then returned to zero again.
He was almost driven by contract trading. Every night, he felt like he was walking on a tightrope in the air, his heart going up and down with the swing of the curve. The real-time fluctuations of assets made it impossible for him to close his eyes and sleep peacefully. He would get up and pick up his phone after lying down for a few minutes.
In less than a month of trading cryptocurrencies, he lost all the 40,000 yuan he had saved from working for two years. He owed another 60,000 yuan in online loans before he finally stopped trading because he couldn't afford to re-enter the market. After losing everything, Yang Yi felt nothing. The only thing that made him unwilling was that he lost the opportunity to enter the market next time, the possibility of "making money back".
Yang Yi finally understood what some contract players meant by "dying before dawn". The money he invested almost never made it through the night. Once, he was so tired that he fell asleep holding his phone. When he woke up the next day, the money was gone, and there was only a text message in his mailbox saying "Your account has been liquidated".
He seldom made money. Even if he did, he would always wait for it to continue to rise, and finally wait for a curve change, and his money would explode with interest.
Now, Yang Yi understood that the contract was a gamble for the low-level cryptocurrency speculators. The rich could invest their spare money and play slowly with a small leverage. But they could only open dangerous multiples, use their savings, living expenses, or even borrow money to fight for the possibility of "wealth freedom". This continent was not the profit-seeking place he imagined.
In various cryptocurrency communities, Yang Yi saw many people torn between life and desire. Some people asked for help, asking what to do after losing money; some wrote long articles, reflecting on how they got to where they are today. Some people left messages saying they wanted to jump off a building and disappeared. He didn't know if these people had waited for their own dawn.
The only straw
If he had money, a stable job, and a family of his own, Yang Yi felt that he would never touch the cryptocurrency world again. But he had nothing, and cryptocurrency trading was like the match in the fairy tale book, and he couldn't help but light it again and again.
This young man who was fighting in the cryptocurrency circle had always been a good kid in the eyes of his parents: he was quiet, quiet, and prudent. The only time he didn't listen to the adults was when he insisted on going to the county town to study in high school.
In their high school, about half of the students can go to college, most of them are second-tier or third-tier universities. He ranks in the lower middle of the class. If he persists until the college entrance examination, he may be able to pass the exam and get into a third-tier university.
But after only half a year, he wanted to drop out. It had nothing to do with grades, he just felt that "studying is useless". He posted his thoughts on Baidu Zhidao and was persuaded by a netizen to study for another year. He dropped out again in the second year of high school. "Many of my classmates who went to third-tier universities ended up being no different."
In a small county town, the trajectory of life seems to be predictable from birth.
The most direct reference is his own father. After graduating from junior high school, his parents went to work at a construction site in Wenzhou, and he went to the county alone and began to live on campus. The construction site can earn 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a year. In order to make a living, leaving home to work in nearby big cities is an extremely common choice in the local area. Many children in county towns are separated from their parents earlier and become "left-behind children."
But Yang Yi longed for a warm and stable home and did not want to repeat the same mistake. After working at the construction site for half a year, he began to look for an opportunity to return to the county. He first went back for a conscription physical examination, but he was found to have "elbow hyperextension" and was rejected. Then he found a job in a karaoke bar in the county, but the monthly salary was only 2,000 yuan. Finally, he had to return to the construction site.
Working in a karaoke bar in the county, Yang Yi described himself as "tired of this dark life"
His life has reached a dead end: like his parents, he works at the construction site and cannot be with his family; he wants to return to the county town to start a family, but a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan is obviously too much to afford; a stable job with a satisfactory income will not be open to this young man with no education and no skills.
Poverty, despair, and the determination to have nothing gave rise to great desires. Despite the continuous loss of principal and loans, Yang Yi could not stop fantasizing about getting rich overnight.
In the summer of 2021, Yang Yi traded in cryptocurrencies for the second time and lost more than 20,000 yuan. This made him fearful, "I felt like I would lose no matter how I played." He deleted all his cryptocurrency friends and trading software, and decided not to trade in cryptocurrencies anymore.
At that time, he didn't expect that a legend would be born shortly after he retired from the circle.
In the cryptocurrency world, Liang Xi is almost known to everyone. This name is always associated with three numbers: 519, 1000, 1000.
"519" refers to the virtual currency crash on May 19, 2021. Data shows that the total amount of liquidation on that day reached 6.28 billion US dollars, or about 40.4 billion RMB. On that day, while countless people abandoned their positions to escape, Liang Xi took 1,000 yuan of principal and used high leverage to roll his position to 10 million RMB. He was 17 years old at the time.
No one thought that it would be a child who caught this historic plunge. The initial capital was 1,000 yuan, which was the "starting threshold" that almost everyone could reach. Liang Xi entered the market with only 1,000 yuan and became a multi-millionaire. This was an absurd possibility.
Although the tens of millions of yuan in profits that Liang Xi made have now turned into liabilities, at least in that year, he got everything. He got rich overnight, traffic, and several founders of trading software successively gave Liang Xi dream funds to reward his "spirit of becoming more courageous after more setbacks."
With one stimulation after another, Yang Yi's determination continued to weaken.
His life has reached a dead end: like his parents, he works at the construction site and cannot be with his family; he wants to return to the county town to start a family, but a monthly salary of 2,000 yuan is obviously too much to afford; a stable job with a satisfactory income will not be open to this young man with no education and no skills.
Poverty, despair, and the determination to have nothing gave rise to great desires. Despite the continuous loss of principal and loans, Yang Yi could not stop fantasizing about getting rich overnight.
In the summer of 2021, Yang Yi traded in cryptocurrencies for the second time and lost more than 20,000 yuan. This made him fearful, "I felt like I would lose no matter how I played." He deleted all his cryptocurrency friends and trading software, and decided not to trade in cryptocurrencies anymore.
At that time, he didn't expect that a legend would be born shortly after he retired from the circle.
In the cryptocurrency world, Liang Xi is almost known to everyone. This name is always associated with three numbers: 519, 1000, 1000.
"519" refers to the virtual currency crash on May 19, 2021. Data shows that the total amount of liquidation on that day reached 6.28 billion US dollars, or about 40.4 billion RMB. On that day, while countless people abandoned their positions to escape, Liang Xi took 1,000 yuan of principal and used high leverage to roll his position to 10 million RMB. He was 17 years old at the time.
No one thought that it would be a child who caught this historic plunge. The initial capital was 1,000 yuan, which was the "starting threshold" that almost everyone could reach. Liang Xi entered the market with only 1,000 yuan and became a multi-millionaire. This was an absurd possibility.
Although the tens of millions of yuan in profits that Liang Xi made have now turned into liabilities, at least in that year, he got everything. He got rich overnight, traffic, and several founders of trading software successively gave Liang Xi dream funds to reward his "spirit of becoming more courageous after more setbacks."
With one stimulation after another, Yang Yi's determination continued to weaken.
Jumping Pole and Sickle
Last year, he came to Shanghai to work as a food deliveryman with his friends, also for the money. He heard that he could make 20,000 yuan a month. This was the first big city he had been to since leaving the county town. In this city, food deliverymen were running around like bees.
Yang Yi took this photo while delivering food in Shanghai. He felt that the people in the photo were like ants, "busy and orderly."
He came in February, but he didn't run fast enough and didn't make much money. In early April, the city was locked down, and ten people in a room rushed to Meituan from morning to night to buy food. After the riders were released early, he and his friends lived in a bridge tunnel and delivered food all over the city. In May, he became familiar with the business and rarely worked overtime. In June, he saved some money.
Desire may have come to him at this time. "If I go there, I will see a richer life." Yang Yi paused, "I feel the gap is too big." Shanghai made him yearn for a better life. Delivering food and working on construction sites would wear out his body and were not a long-term solution. Looking around at the ways around him, the only thing left was cryptocurrency trading, a springboard that he could hold in his hand.
In late June, Yang Yi started his third cryptocurrency trading journey. He invested 5,000 yuan on the first day, but failed. He still had 20,000 yuan saved from delivering food, which was all his savings.
For money, he rushed around during the lockdown. He couldn't go back to his rental house, so he and his fellow riders spent the night in parks or under bridges. For more money, Yang Yi gritted his teeth and threw them in. He was squandering money faster than he expected. After two days, he was left with only food money.
Yang Yi's car is full of supplies waiting to be delivered
He was very sad and had planned to stop there, but then he thought, "If I'm going to do this, I'd better do it big," so his sadness turned into determination. It happened that the limit of an online loan app on his phone suddenly increased sharply, so he first borrowed 50,000 yuan, and then another 30,000 yuan. It was difficult to stop here, so he continued to download other online loan apps and eventually borrowed more than 130,000 yuan.
On July 1, Yang Yi spent all the money. At 10:30 a.m., he posted the word "waste" in his circle of friends, announcing the end of this game.
During this period, he thought about stopping, but he finally convinced himself that there was no way out. He was always afraid that there would be a big fluctuation in the next second after he stopped, and he would regret it if he stopped. It would be better to bet the hope of a comeback on the next order, and fight to the end, even the 700 yuan he had for food, he would invest it.
"I feel like I have nothing, so I want to fight for it," he said. "The less opportunities I have, the more I want to create opportunities for myself."
When cryptocurrency trading becomes a game of wealth, most people want to get rich through it. They don’t know what the Lightning Network is, don’t understand the fork of Bitcoin, and what three words ICO stands for. These ordinary investors who fail to understand the essence of blockchain rush into the market and become the most primitive fighters in the cryptocurrency trading arena, and are also the victims of anonymous promotion of Bitcoin appreciation.
After being liquidated many times, Yang Yi now admits that ordinary people like him are just leeks waiting to be cut. "We all know that we are leeks, but we still want to grab meat from the lions." He made himself laugh. "If we can't grab meat, soup is fine."
Where to find a way out
Last year he owed a loan of 130,000 yuan, and the debt collector called his home. Only then did his parents realize that, out of sight, he had already embarked on another path.
For this small town family, a debt of 130,000 yuan was not easy. His mother cried for him for the first time, and Yang Yi felt sad. He followed his parents' advice and returned to work at the construction site. His family raised the money for him and released him from debt.
But Yang Yi didn't want to stay on the construction site forever. He had dropped out of school six or seven years ago, and the days on the construction site alone occupied nearly five years of his youth.
"The construction site is too dangerous," he said while sighing. Two years ago, he worked on a construction site contracted by a pair of brothers. One minute, the foreman's brother was chatting with him, and the next minute, the wooden board on the tower crane slipped and fell on the other's head, killing him. The terrifyingly high tower crane, the accident-prone trucks, the steel bars and potholes on the construction site all made him want to escape from here.
In his diary, Yang Yi wrote:
Is the construction site my destiny for the rest of my life? No, I will come back after my injuries are healed. Even if I am covered in bruises, I don't want to live a life where I can't see the end of it.
He is 24 years old this year and plans to work on the construction site until the Chinese New Year. As for his plans for next year, Yang Yi counted them on his fingers: construction site, factory, and delivery. "But these three are not what I want."
A while ago, Yang Yi got off work from the construction site and looked up to see a rainbow. This was his "first time to be so close to a rainbow."
At the beginning of last year, he paid 500 yuan in tuition and joined a self-taught college study group. The teacher sent the online course video and asked them to study in their free time and check in in the group after completing it.
Yang Yi persisted for half a month. He studied until 12:00 when he got off work as a deliveryman. He often fell asleep in the teacher's endless chatter because he was too tired. He gave up in the end because he felt that he was not the kind of person who had "free time". He could no longer remember whether the ideological and political course he had not finished was Marx's Capital or Mao Zedong Thought.
For him, the best days may have stayed in his student days. When he was in high school, a friend lent him a palm-sized book about Bill Gates. Yang Yi put it under his pillow and read dozens of pages every night. Before he dropped out of high school and went to work, his roommates joked with him, saying, "Do you want to be Bill Gates?"
He thought that the future was full of opportunities, just like what was written in business books. But after graduating, he found that the world faced by a young person without education and skills was full of difficulties. For many people, just staying alive was all they had.
When delivering food in Shanghai, a rider who was ten years older than Yang Yi heard that he was into crypto and came to talk to him. When he was young, he lost 400,000 yuan in stocks and is still paying off his debts. "These things are not something we can play with," he said to Yang Yi, "we only know how to throw money in."
But Yang Yi is not someone who will give up. When asked if he would trade in cryptocurrencies again, he hesitated for a while and said helplessly that if there is a chance, he would definitely try it. On his desktop, there is still a special category for cryptocurrencies software, which includes some exchanges and information software, a total of ten. He can never give up the little hope in his heart.
——Reposted from inSight