🔥🔥In 2018, I did something that disappointed my parents — I spent the 120,000 yuan I had saved for three years to buy a house down payment on Bitcoin, which was priced at 450 dollars each.
At that time, I always thought, "When the opportunity arises, you must seize it." Until a year later, in a rented guesthouse in Chiang Mai, when my phone popped up with a balance of 2.3 million, I really thought I was going to turn my luck around.
But the bear market came faster than a torrential rain. By the end of 2018, the account number shrank from 2.3 million to 220,000, like a balloon that got punctured.
I sat at a small table in the hotel, having to use my credit card for the continuous accommodation fees 💳, and the sound of rain outside felt piercing — it turned out that the so-called "opportunity" hurt so much when falling.
Later, after experiencing liquidation and being cut many times, I slowly figured out four "rules for survival":
First, don’t touch areas you don’t understand. In the early years, I heard people say that virtual land could appreciate, and without even understanding the land's purpose, I rushed in and lost 220,000 in a week, only to realize that "money earned outside of your understanding is unreachable."
Second, position sizing must be done well. Now, I invest 50% in Bitcoin and Ethereum, 30% in cross-platform arbitrage, and 20% as emergency funds. Last year, when ETH dropped to 1200, I used my emergency funds to supplement my position and didn’t miss the rebound; no matter how chaotic the market got, I remained calm.
Third, avoid leverage altogether. The time I was fully liquidated in contracts, I returned to square one overnight, and afterward, I directly froze the contract functions on the exchange — they are not amplifiers for profit; they are harvesters of principal.
Fourth, discern information yourself. Signal groups and influencer recommendations are all traps; I only trust on-chain data and white papers. Before the FTX crash in 2022, I noticed something was off with the reserve data and withdrew my assets in advance, which helped me avoid disaster.
Now, I no longer hope for skyrocketing prices; I only seek a stable annual return of 20%, and so far this year, it just barely makes 18%. Surviving this journey in the crypto world is stronger than anything else.
Many people are trapped in the ups and downs; it's not that they don’t work hard, but they lack a bit of clarity. The market is constant; only by finding the right guide can one avoid taking the wrong path.
