"The Confession of Twelve Years as a Sucker: School Teaches You How to Be a Person, the Crypto World Teaches You How to Survive"

At three in the morning, I lit another cigarette. The Bitcoin on the screen is consolidating, resembling an electrocardiogram, just like the nerves that have been repeatedly tugged for these twelve years.

I just saw an essay written by a college student, complaining that the school didn't teach survival skills and turned them into "sheep". I unkindly laughed. College student, what you call "anxiety", I call "survival".

1. The biggest lie: hard work leads to wealth

When I first entered the crypto world in 2013, I also had a good student mentality. I thought that if I thoroughly researched the white paper, understood the technical logic, and even learned to draw wave theories, I could make money. School taught me: You reap what you sow. The crypto world taught me: If you make the wrong choice, all efforts are in vain; if you stand in the wrong wind, there's no turning back.

For the past twelve years, I have watched helplessly as those big shots who advocate "value investing" and blindly believe in technological innovation, clung to EOS and those so-called "world-changing" public chains, only to end up at zero. On the other hand, those "local dogs" with only a junior high school education understood human nature and emotions, created a Meme coin with no technical content, shouted a few slogans, and multiplied their investment a hundred times in three days.

At that moment, I understood: what the school teaches is the "Newton's laws" of the physical world, while here it operates on the "Soros alchemy" of social psychology. Hard work is the cheapest here; cognition and courage are the hard currency.

2. Arts and Sciences? Here, there are only "sickle" and "suckers".

You are still arguing about whether language is more important than math. In front of the candlestick chart, the sciences are your defense, and the humanities are your offense.

Without a scientific logic, you won't understand the vulnerabilities of smart contracts, can't calculate the yield of staking, and can be wiped out in minutes by hackers and project parties.

Without a liberal arts mindset, you won't understand what "consensus" is, nor will you grasp the market sentiment of FOMO (fear of missing out). You will fear when you should be greedy, and buy in when you should be fearful.

Schools divide the world into subjects, while the crypto world restores it to human nature. There are no teachers here to highlight the key points; the only teacher is "loss." The tuition fees are too expensive, easily amounting to hundreds of thousands or even millions of real money. In school, you can retake a failed exam, but here, a single operational mistake could mean delivering takeout to pay off debts for three years.

Three, Cage Farming VS Jungle

You say the school has "raised" you? In fact, "raising" is a form of protection. At school, the worst outcome is being criticized; at a company, the worst outcome is being fired. But in the crypto world, this absolute "dark forest", no one protects you. Decentralization means no police, no bank customer service, sending money to the wrong account means eternal disappearance, and losing your private key means wealth is reset to zero.

In these twelve years, I have learned what it truly means to "take responsibility for my actions." Here, no one listens to your complaints. If you lost money, it's because you were foolish, greedy, or weak. Here, tears are not believed; only computing power and chips are trusted.

Schools teach us to be honest and kind. The market teaches me: do not listen to what he says (narrative), but look at what he does (on-chain data). All talk of ideology, but in their hearts, it's all business.

Four, The Disenchantment of Money

I used to think a monthly salary of ten thousand was middle class, and buying a house meant stability. After spending a long time in this crypto world, my understanding of money has been completely restructured.

Salary is "poison": it gives you an illusion of stability, making you feel like a donkey on a millstone that dares not stop.

Volatility is a "friend": only volatility can bring nonlinear wealth. A stagnant life is a graveyard.

Leverage is the "nuclear weapon": Schools never teach you how to use leverage, they only tell you that borrowing money is scary. However, transcending classes has never been about saving money, but about seizing the right moment to take limited risks for unlimited returns.

V. Final Summary: The way has not changed, but the law has been modified.

I now look at those recent college graduates, no longer finding them naive. On the contrary, I am filled with envy. I envy the vitality on their faces that hasn't been beaten down yet, and I envy their arrogance of wanting to "rebuild the old world they can't stand."

I used to think experience was the way to go, but now I understand that youth is the greatest leverage.

In these twelve years, I have seen the tulips in books, the internet bubble, Bitcoin, and the current Memes. I finally understand that every era has its own "hype," and each era is ultimately defined by the young people. While we study technical white papers and calculate price-to-earnings ratios, the young people have directly rewritten the rules using "emotion" and "consensus." They do not believe in our logic; they have created their own language.

"The way" is the same: greed, fear, supply and demand, games of chance; human nature has not changed for thousands of years. But the language of the way has changed: those born in the 60s talk about real estate, those born in the 80s talk about the internet, and those born in the 00s talk about decentralization, memes, and AI.

If we old-timers are still using the old-fashioned language to hard decode the problems of the new era, then we are truly the "suckers", the antiques abandoned by the times. To survive in this market, it's not about educating the young people, but about understanding them. Because they are the future liquidity, they are the future candlestick charts.

The cigarettes are finished. The Americans are about to celebrate Christmas, institutions are on holiday, and the market liquidity is as thin as paper. With this kind of depth, just a little bit of capital can blow up the price, and the whales love to manipulate the market with up and down spikes during this "no one is watching" time.

That night, I dared not sleep. Not only to safeguard the money in my account, but also to keep an eye on the screen to see which direction these young people were pushing the world that I still didn't understand.