At 28, "ByteDance's Guo Yu" retired; at 34, he reveals the truth: financial freedom is not true freedom.

The true meaning of the search for freedom: not to get rid of something, but to learn to settle oneself in constant arrival. This article is based on an article written by Tian Daxia and compiled, compiled and written by Foresight News. (Synopsis: On the road to wealth freedom, please ask yourself these 3 questions first) (Background supplement: Netizen soul question: Is it too late to buy bitcoin and want wealth freedom? The true meaning of freedom: not to get rid of something, but to learn to settle oneself in constant arrival. On the day of the interview with Guo Yu, he happened to be returning to Tokyo from Hokkaido. It was May this year, and the rainy season in Tokyo had just begun, and he talked about summer in Hokkaido with a rare lightness in his conversational video. “I prefer Hokkaido in summer to winter.” Mr. Guo says Furano in winter is crowded with Christmas tree watchers, while in summer Furano has only rolling green hills, and he and his friends drive across undisturbed roads, hike and soak in hot springs, briefly escaping Tokyo's humidity in the dry, cool air. Guo Yu's travels in Hokkaido Three months after the interview, Guo Yu extended his travels to Tanzania, Sri Lanka, and his return to his “happy hometown” Maldives, and I contacted him again after his trip to the Middle East. Travel became part of his daily life, and he seemed accustomed to marking the passage of time with new geographical coordinates. This former web entrepreneur and digital nomad seems to be on the road forever. More than five years after retirement, his understanding of “freedom” seems clearer: I used to think that financial freedom is absolute freedom, but it is actually a wrong judgment… Most importantly, we need to be aware of this issue and its importance very early in life. Guo Yu Who is Guo Yu? Guo Yu is well known to the public in 2020. That year, he wrote this sentence in a letter of resignation - “I chose to retire at the end of the age of 28, to embrace the wind of mountain springs and canyons, to feel spring, autumn, winter and summer.” Four months later, the letter was suddenly turned over and quickly ignited a discussion on the Internet: some envied, some questioned, and others regarded him as a representative of the “lucky ones under the Internet startup boom.” The words “young”, “retirement” and “wealth freedom” have become labels on him. He became a “escape template” for the imagination of countless young people. At that turbulent juncture in the post-pandemic era, he became the most vivid “reverse sample” on social media - a person who turned away in the tide of the times. ** Childhood and Growth Guo Yu's childhood was spent in the mines of Jiangxi. As a left-behind child, he was often extremely lonely during his winter and summer vacations, and his only solace came from the Christian books his grandmother left him and the self-expression that came with writing. These words and beliefs became the most important spiritual outlet in his early life. Later, he came to “Shenzhen Senior High School” to study. The education here made him realize for the first time that “choice is more important than effort”. In this school, many students are the children of entrepreneurs, and they are anxious that “if they can't pass the Ivy League exam, they can only go back to inherit the family business”; At that time, Guo Yu was facing the reality of “his father was sick in bed”. Shenzhen's open atmosphere and diverse values have shaped his character of “never resignation”. For him, fate is not predetermined, but a process that can be constantly rewritten through choice and practice. Guo Yu in high school Later, he was successfully admitted to Jinan University, majoring in politics and administration. However, Guo Yu soon realized that the profession could not support his future livelihood. So, he began to teach himself to program. “At that time, there was no other way to go, I had to find a way out to support myself.” With this persistence, he successfully joined Alibaba's Alipay after graduation and accumulated his initial industrial experience here. In the wave of the golden age of the Internet, Guo Yu seized his own opportunity to become part of the “option myth”. In 2014, Guo Yu's startup was acquired by ByteDance, and he officially joined the startup, which was valued at only $500 million at the time. Since then, his life has been pushed into a frenzy of wealth and dreams. As an early employee, he devoted himself fully to the development of the company's core projects. ByteDance's valuation has skyrocketed a hundredfold in six years, and Guo Yu's early stock options have risen with it. Investing & Crypto Experience Over the past decade, he first rode the wave of the Internet to achieve financial freedom, then turned into a sober observer of the crypto space, experiencing the ups and downs of the crypto market firsthand, and now his perspective is becoming clearer. Recently, he wrote a paragraph on Twitter that resonated widely in the crypto community: He wrote: “Many friends in the cryptocurrency circle have no concept of money, today stud this, tomorrow all in that.” Trading, staring, and staying in front of the computer all year round is easy to detach from reality. I still recommend that you read 10,000 books and travel thousands of miles. Spend money on the experience of life, luxury goods can be bought, money can be earned, but don't get stuck in it." ** A short sentence, but it resonates inside and outside the circle. After the black swan event on October 11, many people sighed: it seems that everyone has begun to lose their sense of reality and forget that money can still be spent on “living”. Money can't be spent or earned, but the life lost can never be returned. Guo Yu's crypto journey began in April 2013, when he was at Alipay, attracted by the heated discussion of bitcoin breaking $100 on Hacker News, and discussed it at an internal technical sharing session. At the time, most transactions were done through Taobao's OTC channels, and he joked that he even bought Ripple, which Sun was promoting at the time. During the ICO boom in 2017, he first tried to write smart contracts. Even after “retiring” from WordDance to Japan in 2020, he published a lengthy article on the Mirror platform in 2021 reviewing missed technology trends. If byte wealth allowed him to “retire” early, the crypto world was a spiritual playground for his technical sense and mental vitality before and after retirement. Today, he is more of an observer and recorder relegated to the sidelines. He admits that he was not part of the new generation's craze for meme coins like the Trump Token, but “wanted to document that” because the younger generation is far more sensitive to opportunities than his contemporaries. On October 11, a big drop in the crypto market caused Guo Yu to once again systematically explain his observations on the industry for more than a decade on Twitter. He systematically elaborated his understanding of the Bitcoin price discovery mechanism and divided the process into three stages. The first is the “OTC Trading Phase of Antiquity”. He personally experienced that period, where over-the-counter trading was the dominant model, prices were very discrete, and the cost of mining farms determined the true price basis of Bitcoin for a long time. The second is the “centralized exchange order book stage”. OTC was replaced by a more efficient order book, but it also created problems. Some exchanges have introduced futures or even perpetual contracts as their main business, and the price model no longer follows the basic logic of supply and demand. The third is the “Wall Street Turnover Stage After the Bitcoin ETF Passes”. Guo Yu believes that from that moment on, Bitcoin has lost the meaning of its original design: “to help everyone resist the unlimited expansion of debt.” Because, after that moment until now, the pie has been exchanged by Wall Street for its own hands every day." ** He saw that CEX's spot stock and trading volume have shrunk sharply since then, and its trading volume can no longer reflect the large…