Recently, I thought again about the person Guo Hongcai. His experience actually says quite a lot about some things in the crypto world.

To put it simply, Guo Hongcai was not, at the very beginning, one of those “chosen ones.” Born in 1983 in Shanxi’s Pingyao, he scored only 300 points on the college entrance exam in 2003. But this guy had an obsession—he stubbornly went north alone, rented a small room at Tsinghua’s Qinglan Courtyard, and started auditing classes. During that period, he kept thinking about how to make money, until he came into contact with Bitcoin in 2013.

Back then, Garage Coffee was still just an incubation platform. Later, someone who talked about blockchain came in and gained a whole bunch of followers—this person was Li Xiaolai. Guo Hongcai saw this wave of hype and officially entered the industry in 2014. At that time, Bitcoin crashed hard; instead, he massively bought the dip. He even invested in building a mining farm in Inner Mongolia, claiming it was the world’s largest. That mining farm mined 100 Bitcoins in that year, and the electricity cost was only 5,000 yuan per coin.

In 2015, the bear market arrived. Crypto conferences were cold and deserted, and large numbers of people went bankrupt and left. But Guo Hongcai didn’t lie flat. On the one hand, he watched movies to learn English, and on the other, he kept his enthusiasm for this industry. In 2016, he was invited to attend the Davos Forum. Wearing a T-shirt and slippers, he sat among a group of well-dressed financial professionals and discussed high-level topics like Bitcoin, blockchain, and fintech in English—shocking the whole room.

In 2017, the crypto market began to rebound, and Guo Hongcai finally waited for spring. In August, he organized a massive live broadcast for 100,000 people, going through the development of Bitcoin over the past few years. The live-stream gifts brought in more than 10,000 yuan. In September, after the domestic ban was issued, he also proactively initiated an event called “China Tour.” By this time, Guo Hongcai was unrivaled in popularity.

But starting in 2018, the whole vibe changed. In the first half of the year, the crypto market’s rise and fall was unpredictable—insider information, pump-and-dump projects, and retail investors demanding rights and protection made the crypto world even livelier than the entertainment industry. In the second half of the year, it kept falling all the way. Big players’ personas collapsed, project teams ran off, and investors’ ankles were cut. Guo Hongcai wasn’t spared either. In August, a video of him spilling the truth after drinking leaked. He admitted that he repeatedly bought the dip and ended up losing, with 400 Bitcoins gone—when the incident happened, he still had 600 left.

Actually, this incident says a lot. After this round of bear market, Guo Hongcai gradually adjusted his strategy and began focusing on more assets. After 2020, he went through multiple bull-and-bear cycles, and his understanding of the market kept deepening. Guo Hongcai’s story is essentially a snapshot of more than a decade of the crypto world—there’s the thrill of getting rich quickly, but there’s also the painful reality of being cut. In the end, the ones who survive are those who can keep insisting on learning and constantly adjust their strategies.