Bao Erye, formerly known as Guo Hongcai, is the founder of Bitangel Fund and the founder of Blockchain Huangpu Military Academy. He focuses on angel investment in the field of Bitcoin and blockchain.
Bao Er Ye is a big-shot figure in the domestic currency circle. People in the industry respectfully call him "Bao Er Ye". He is 35 years old and some even regard him as a "grassroots idol". However, he often calls himself a "beef seller" and a "nouveau riche".
Beef seller Guo Hongcai encounters Bitcoin
Guo Hongcai was born in Pingyao, Shanxi Province, which is famous throughout the country for its ancient city and beef. Before investing in Bitcoin, Guo Hongcai was the head of the sales department of Pingyao Beef Group Co., Ltd.
In 2013, Guo Hongcai, who was already tired of selling beef, and his wife Jin Yangyang went to Beijing to learn how to use e-commerce channels to sell beef. As a result, they met Li Xiaolai.
Li Xiaolai, who was already well-known in the field of Bitcoin, held a sharing session on Bitcoin at the famous "Garage Coffee" in Zhongguancun, Beijing. Jin Yangyang was one of the audience. At that time, Yangyang was pregnant with her third child. After listening to the lecture, this "Mrs. Bao" decisively bought hundreds of thousands of RMB worth of Bitcoin at the price of 500 RMB per coin.
When Guo Hongcai found out that his wife had spent a large amount of money to buy Bitcoin, he panicked and thought his wife had been fooled by a pyramid scheme. He asked her to sell it quickly, but his wife seemed to have been brainwashed and refused to sell it. So Guo Hongcai and his wife made an appointment with Li Xiaolai. Unexpectedly, he was also slowly "brainwashed" and gradually began to believe that Bitcoin was a good thing and could make money. He decided to give up the beef business, switch to full-time research on Bitcoin, and start "all in".
Minerals such as chicken farms
Guo Hongcai is a man of temperament. He graduated from high school and started to trade in cryptocurrencies because he didn't want to go back to selling beef. He never talked about feelings or morality, and made no secret of making money. He gave himself the English name Chandler Guo, which means he is happy when he gets money.
At the end of 2013, a program called "Bao Erye Teaches You How to Use Bitcoin" was created online, and since then, there has been a "Bao Erye" in the currency circle.
In 2014, Bao Erye built the world's largest Bitcoin mine in Inner Mongolia. From a distance, the mine looks like a chicken farm, and it is full of Bitcoin mining machines. We consume about 500,000 yuan in electricity every day, and at that time (2014), we could produce 100 Bitcoins.
Later, due to the bear market of Bitcoin and the high mining costs, Bao Erye shifted his focus and explored other directions. It was also in 2014 that Bao Erye bought the BTC123 Bitcoin Portal, the number one navigation platform in the domestic digital currency industry, from Mo Buyi for 5,000 Bitcoins, and served as co-founder and COO.
Teaching and learning, Bitcoin China Tour
Since 2015, Bao Erye has started his "Bitcoin China Tour", driving the domestic Great Wall he bought when he was doing business in the south to pick up foreigners at the airport to look impressive: the only one of the extended cars with a built-in bar, touring the country, giving speeches and preaching Bitcoin. Bao Erye frankly admitted that he bought an extended car just to show off, because "if you don't have confidence, you have to use a car to give yourself confidence."
Bao Erye has always been famous in the cryptocurrency circle for his vicious, vulgar and straightforward remarks. He has never concealed his image of a "nouveau riche" who shows off his wealth. Because Bao Erye believes that the culture in the cryptocurrency circle is grassroots culture and loser culture, he uses a very simple marketing model and the most vulgar way to make everyone remember it - "Blow up the bragging first, what if it comes true?"
Therefore, Guo Hongcai’s way of “teaching and learning” in the currency circle is to “create momentum”. In many speeches at the “Bitcoin China Tour”, he has made many “fanatical remarks” about Bitcoin, such as: “Buy a Bitcoin, keep it, and give it to your child when he gets married!”, “In the future, the price of a Bitcoin will reach 1 million US dollars!”, etc.
The economic forum is on fire
In 2016, Bao Erye was invited to attend the Davos Forum, where he frequently made shocking remarks. He preached that he was a die-hard fan of Bitcoin, which attracted a lot of attention at the time and won him countless fans in the entire cryptocurrency circle. It was also from that time that many people in the cryptocurrency circle began to pay attention to Bao Erye.
At that time, Bao Erye didn't know what Davos was all about. He thought it was just a bunch of brothers sitting there bragging and chatting, so he went there wearing shorts and slippers. As a result, the security guards didn't let him in. Later, the project team came forward to coordinate, and he was able to enter the venue. Looking around, everyone was in suits and ties, and only he and the female host in a skirt showed their legs.
At the conference, those financial professionals in suits who questioned Bitcoin and blockchain made Guo Hongcai very upset, so he used his "half-baked" English to criticize them on the spot. He was not afraid of the situation and shocked everyone by claiming that "the value of Bitcoin is equal to the value of the GDP of all countries in the future." Only one person who came from New York to participate in the exchange had worked in blockchain and thought that what Guo Hongcai said made sense.
After the live video was circulated, "Bao Erye" became famous. Guo Hongcai pinned the relevant video on Weibo with the caption "It took us only three years to make the financial world tremble."
Harvesting leeks on the platform
In 2017, the topics of blockchain and Bitcoin swept the world, triggering a wave of cryptocurrency speculation.
In the first half of 2017, 1CO became the most popular investment project in the world. As long as many projects released white papers, their project tokens would increase tenfold or even a hundredfold. If these projects wanted to enter the Chinese market, they needed to be endorsed by celebrities in the cryptocurrency circle to expand their influence.
After Bao Erye borrowed money from Dong to set up his own investment fund, he helped various projects everywhere. In three months, he worked on more than 30 projects, with a total market value of more than 400 million yuan. As the number of winners increased, investors' favorability towards Bao Erye increased further, and gradually formed a good reputation among the grassroots investors. As a result, everyone began to form a kind of thinking inertia: as long as the project is supported by Bao Erye, it is a good project.
Guo Hongcai is a vulgar person. He even publicly announced that he does not invest, but only endorses the projects. The endorsement fee is 1%. He also does not hide the fact that he does not know much about the projects he endorses: "I endorse those projects without even investigating them."
However, after a bear market that lasted for half a year, investors began to find that the original investment method no longer worked. No matter how Bao Erye supported it, the currency price continued to plummet. Some projects broke their issue prices, some returned to zero, and more projects stagnated.
Guo Hongcai has endorsed many projects, as many as 100. After listing on exchanges, many projects can rise 6 or 7 times (even within a day), and then plummet several times in a short period of time. Take Achain as an example. On August 17, 2017, the price of Achain was 1.5 yuan when it was listed on the Jubi trading platform. The next day, it rose to 4.444 yuan, and on August 19, it plummeted 52.07%. Faced with such a steep rise and fall curve, many people in the currency circle began to have more concerns about the projects endorsed by Guo Hongcai.
Amidst many doubts, Guo Hongcai established the "Coin Circle Huangpu Military Academy" in August 2017 to select outstanding ICO projects, drive grassroots entrepreneurship, and provide a good entrepreneurial platform for grassroots. The first phase of the "Huangpu Military Academy" attracted more than 20 ICO projects, but the projects of the "Huangpu Military Academy" all came from the grassroots, and the quality of the projects was uneven. We have not seen any outstanding projects from the "Huangpu Military Academy".
Guo Hongcai once vowed to support the DomainChain project, claiming that DomainChain would increase 250 times! It is rumored that Guo Hongcai himself also invested in DomainChain, which attracted a large number of investors. However, DomainChain experienced a sharp rise and fall on the first day of its launch. Finally, on September 4, 2017, DomainChain was recovered at cost price, which greatly reaped the fans.
It was not until September 4, 2017, that seven ministries issued a regulatory document, and Guo Hong stopped endorsing various projects.
Boast, fork, run away
Although Bao Erye is not on an open platform, he still often hypes up a coin to the sky. Not only that, he also forked Bitcoin.
In the first half of 2018, Bao Erye promoted FCoin's FT. When FT reached about 1 US dollar, he promoted FT on platforms such as Weibo and WeChat Moments. Since then, FT has been falling all the way, with a drop of more than 95%.
Not only does Bao Erye hype up the coin, he also creates his own forked coin.
On November 30, Guo Hongcai announced that Bitcoin will be forked on Christmas Eve 2017, and the forked currency will be called Bitcoin God. One, no mining, two, no additional issuance, three, no name BTC, and four, all will be distributed to users, God's hand! Guo Hongcai explained on Twitter.
Bitcoin God once surged to 5,500 yuan, and then plummeted to the current 90 yuan, a drop of more than 98%. That is to say, if you invested 100,000 yuan to buy Bitcoin God at the highest point, now you only have 1,636 yuan left.
After forking Bitcoin God, on the last day of 2017, Bao Erye recorded a short video at the airport. He said with emotion that he flew 290,000 kilometers in 2017, more than 98.8% of the world's people, and he never thought that he would do so many things in a year. Then he boarded a plane to Zhuhai to prepare for activities in Macau in mid-January. Macau also became his last appearance in China, and Bao Erye went to the United States soon after.
Leek Manor
There was a rumor in the industry: There is Li Xiaolai in the north of China and Guo Hongcai in the south. Later, people in the industry changed it to: After Li Xiaolai is arrested, there is still Guo Hongcai. After ICO was banned, Guo Hongcai said several times that he was "a person walking on the edge of the law, and he didn't know when he would go to jail." He even posted a circle of friends that was both teasing and courageous: "Catch Li Xiaolai first, then Guo Hongcai."
Why did "Bao Erye" move his family to the United States, and why didn't he return to China? In the video interview, Bao Erye said: "Because I have invested in too many projects, and the country has cracked down on this. In order to avoid the limelight and fear of being arrested, I dare not return to China. I am currently avoiding the limelight abroad, and I will return to China in the future."
On January 25, 2018, when Bao Erye sent out his first Weibo post located in the United States, most people in the circle thought that he had made enough money and was running away.
In the United States, Bao Erye loves to show off his wealth more and more, and his dreams of "living in a luxury house and driving a luxury car" have been realized one by one.
In March 2018, Guo Hongcai purchased a 100-acre mansion in Silicon Valley. On April 23, he officially hung a sign with the words "Leek Manor" on the gate. In order to make his manor truly worthy of its name, he also planted a small bunch of leeks in a corner of the manor. I wonder what the "leeks" who were harvested think of this move?
In addition to purchasing a luxury house, Guo Hongcai also bought two Rolls-Royces: one is a limited edition Rolls-Royce worth 60 bitcoins, only one in the entire United States, and it takes three months to pick up the car; the other is a white Rolls-Royce Phantom worth 25 bitcoins, which he bought as a gift for his wife.
“Because I want to buy a luxury house and a luxury car when I make money. This is my life dream. Playing with Bitcoin is the only opportunity. Playing with other things does not have such a great possibility because not many people play with Bitcoin. There are great opportunities in this small field.”
Although people in the industry have mixed opinions about Guo Hongcai, some admire his "easy and unrestrained" nature, while others think he is just a "nouveau riche who is good at harvesting leeks."
But what is undeniable is that Guo Hongcai has obviously caught the wave of development in the Bitcoin blockchain industry and successfully staged a loser's counterattack in reality, transforming him from a grassroots beef seller into a "leader" figure who cannot be underestimated in the Bitcoin blockchain industry.
