Bitcoin went from being bought and held for a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, Boring Ape went from buying and holding 0.1 eth to 100 eth, and Tencent went from buying and holding a few yuan a share to a few hundred yuan a share...

What kind of people can reap these returns of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of times?

Even if you only invest 10,000 yuan, there are countless opportunities to exchange for houses in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, or cars such as Rolls-Royce and Bentley, or even buy yachts and airplanes. Why can these people not be tempted and continue to hold on?

Don’t think that you are in it early, as there are many people who enter early and also sell out early. Don’t think that you are holding on to it for a long time. Holding on to it for a long time may mean that you are trapped for a long time and don’t sell out. That is loss aversion, which is nothing big.

According to my observation, this small number of people usually have the following three possibilities:

1. Having a lot of money does not mean you are not short of money. Entering early and holding on for a long time is very anti-human. In theory, you must be unable to do something with the existing asset level.

When investment products continue to rise, there always comes a point where, no matter who you are, you will logically sell them off and do things that you couldn't do before but wanted to do more, such as improving your life, fulfilling your dreams, or even using the money to change the world.

Therefore, a big reason is that the assets that have increased thousands or tens of thousands of times still do not account for a significant proportion of their total assets. We often hear people say "the rich are getting richer".

In fact, it is more difficult for rich people to obtain the same proportion of asset growth, but in terms of absolute growth, it is of course easier with a larger principal. This also includes situations like this, where they often inadvertently find that some strange assets in their hands have suddenly increased countless times - maybe they themselves don’t even remember buying them at the time, because they bought too many things.

If you have money, you will have a good attitude. If you can remain unmoved by the temptation to cash out, it will be easier for you to hold on to it for a long time.

2. Buy enough, buy them one by one when they are cheap. There are always friends around me who ask me how many bitcoins I have. I usually don’t answer with an exact number, but give an approximate number.

They would ask, "Oh, it has gone up so much, how did you manage not to sell it for so many years?" Actually, I am not a god, I have sold a lot, and the most I have ever owned is more than 3 times the amount of Bitcoin I have now.

Where did it go? Like everyone else, I sold it. I bought a house and started a business. I am ashamed to say that I have been in business for more than 10 years and have done many projects. Even if I add up all the successful ones, I still cannot make back the amount of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is moving too fast. The profit from hoarding Bitcoin exceeds everything I have ever done.

Why do I still hold more than most people? It’s very simple. In the early days, we bought a lot of stocks one by one. So when the price rose several times, we sold a little. After selling for a long time, we found that we still had a lot more than ordinary people.

3. Locked and cannot be sold. There are two types of locks, one is passive and the other is active.

The government of Sweden has been forced to return about $2.2 million worth of bitcoins it seized from a drug dealer in prison after bitcoin prices soared while he was in jail. Five years ago, Swedish authorities seized 36 bitcoins from the drug dealer, which were worth only about $136,000 at the time, or about $3,700 each. At the time, Swedish prosecutors successfully argued in court that the drug dealer should be deprived of the bitcoins he illegally obtained. However, prosecutors used the monetary equivalent of these bitcoins to make their point at the time and did not anticipate the subsequent crazy rise in bitcoin prices.

As of now, the price of Bitcoin has reached around $60,000, which means that the drug dealer's 36 Bitcoins two years ago were worth only the equivalent of 2 Bitcoins today.

When the drug dealer was released, the authorities were going to auction off all 36 of his coins, but because prosecutors used the cash value of the bitcoins at the time of the indictment, rather than the number, the government will now only be able to auction off two of the bitcoins and will have to return the remaining 34 to the drug dealer.

If it weren’t for this passive lock-up, I would have sold it long ago. With $2 million, I can be financially free in a small city.

Another situation is active self-locking, which is suitable for most people. They follow a group of people with the same ideas to overcome human weaknesses. That is, they know that they cannot hold on, so they actively enter an environment and participate in a game that they cannot get out of midway.

Take the initiative to put your money in a safe place you trust, with rules that prohibit you from taking it out, or use technology to ensure that you can't take it out before a certain time. Put your coins and money in at regular intervals, then lie down and forget about it.

This is not to encourage everyone to gamble on getting rich quickly in this way, but there is a high probability that ordinary people will get rich quickly in this way. It is impossible for ordinary people to hold assets that can be sold at any time and make 100 times the profit by selling them.

So what did you find?

This group of people did not have super firm beliefs at the beginning. Even if they did have beliefs, they would have grown slowly. If you hold something that keeps setting new highs, even if you did not have beliefs at first, you will have them slowly.

What we need to rely on is the people we are with, the environment we are in, and the constraints from the mechanism. What people can do with willpower is actually very limited. The achievement of all goals is basically influenced by the environment and mechanism.

But no, while we can still control our own actions and make our own decisions, and before the weaknesses of human nature can completely take over us, we can actively seek out a group of people like us and put ourselves in a certain environment. This is a lock-up we can actively choose.

I think such seemingly simple decisions account for at least half of most successes.

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