繁 简 En
Bitcoin breaks through 110,000 dollars, regrets and misses of those years
2025-05-26 13:51

On May 22, the 14th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day, Bitcoin broke through the $110,000 mark and hit a new all-time high.

That is to say, in the 15 years after 2010, you will not lose money by buying Bitcoin at any time, and Bitcoin will not let anyone down.
I guess many friends, like me, may have seen a lot of emotions and sighs on Moments, telling stories of how they missed Bitcoin and how they sold Bitcoin. For example, my colleague once sold 10 Bitcoins to pay rent, followed by various sighs, saying, "If only I had bought Bitcoin back then, if only I had persisted in holding it..." Whenever this happens, many people attribute the wealth of early Bitcoin investors to pure luck, saying that they just'knew it earlier ', as if'knowing it earlier' inevitably equals'getting rich quick '.

Today, I want to talk to you with two stories, what is the real miss bitcoin, and why miss bitcoin?

The first story is about Zhihu girl and Bitcoin.

You should have seen this answer from Zhihu. On December 21, 2011, a female college student asked on Zhihu, "What are some good financial investment suggestions for a junior student with 6000 yuan?" On the same day, a netizen named "blockchain" replied, "Buy Bitcoin, save your wallet file, and forget about having 6000 yuan. Look again in five years." This answerer is Zhang Jia, an early Bitcoin evangelist and founder of Babbitt.

1-1

Since then, whenever Bitcoin rises sharply, netizens flood into the comment section, tirelessly telling the questioner how much they would be worth if they had bought Bitcoin before. The latest data shows that if the questioner had bought all 6,000 yuan worth of Bitcoin at that time, they could have bought more than 300 coins, and now the total value is 33 million US dollars, 230 million RMB.

So, here comes the question, did the asker buy Bitcoin in the end? Hehe, actually I know the follow-up. When I was working in Beijing in 2018, I happened to contact the asker on Zhihu, let's call her Zhuzi for now, and then a colleague interviewed her. The final answer was no. She did not make any investments. In the spring of 2012, she went to Hangzhou and other places with friends for a week with a scholarship of 6,000 yuan. Since then, every time Bitcoin has risen sharply, the comments under this question always seem to remind her that she missed the opportunity to get rich quick.

However, Zhuzi has never bought Bitcoin. Although she regretted it later, she believes that "if I were still the same person as before, I would still make the same choice as seven years ago." In Zhuzi's view, a person's personality is there, just like the character design in a novel. Behavior is derived from the character design and will not change much.

So the question is, do you think bamboo missed out on Bitcoin? If you were bamboo, would you regret it late at night?

Let's not talk about it for now, let me share the second story with everyone.

The protagonist of the second story is also an Internet celebrity. Some stock traders may have heard of him. His name is Lao Duan. Lao Duan, whose real name is Duan Hongbin, is a financial columnist and one of the earliest Bitcoin players in China.

In 2010, he first saw Bitcoin on Google Reader and was immediately attracted to it. He once described Bitcoin as "a tool for losers to make a comeback in the geek world".

Lao Duan recalled the scene at that time and felt that the geeks had created new inventions in the virtual world. He compared Bitcoin to "stones on the island of stone coins". Here is a knowledge point to add. Everyone takes notes. The island of stone coins refers to Yap Island in the western Pacific Ocean. On this island, currency is stones. These stones are a few centimeters in diameter, a few meters in diameter, and weigh several tons, so they cannot be carried around at all. They are simply placed there. Ownership is recorded through oral transmission, and transactions are based on consensus and collective memory. It is considered one of the earliest "virtual currency" systems. The currency system of the island of stone coins demonstrates an important economic principle: the value of currency lies not in its physical form, but in social consensus and trust system.

Speaking of Lao Duan, at the beginning of the birth of Bitcoin, Lao Duan became one of the evangelists of Bitcoin in China.

In July 2011, Lao Duan wrote his first article related to Bitcoin, titled "What can appreciate 3000 times in a year?" In this article, he mentioned that as a currency system that is independent of government will, the value of Bitcoin depends entirely on market trust and demand. He believed that a total limit of 21 million can effectively prevent counterfeiting and copying, while a set output rate can avoid inflation.

Lao Duan called on everyone to buy at least one Bitcoin in the article. He said at the time, "Currently, the price of one Bitcoin is only 100 RMB. Even if you lose all of it, it's only a meal. But if the number of Bitcoin users expands to tens of millions in the next few years, then on average, each person won't even get one Bitcoin. At that time, having one Bitcoin will make you rich."

At the moment of 2025, when Bitcoin breaks through the 110,000 dollar, looking at this expression, it is indeed a golden advice.

In the same year, Lao Duan and two other early Bitcoin players, Chang Jia and QQagent, jointly created the Chinese Bitcoin community "Babite", which had a profound impact on later blockchain participants. It is worth mentioning that QQagent was the earliest translator of the Bitcoin white paper and Wu Jihan, co-founder of Bitmain, who to some extent rewrote the history of cryptocurrency.

In July 2012, when the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $7, Lao Duan decided to establish a Bitcoin fund called "Lao Duan Bitcoin No.1", which was also the first Bitcoin fund in China. Due to legal and market risks, the fund was not aimed at public fundraising. The total size of the first phase was 100,000 yuan, 40% of which came from Lao Duan himself, and the remaining 60% came from his friends. Lao Duan publicly promised to fully compensate investors if Bitcoin disappeared or its value went to zero. As the fund manager, he did not charge management fees, only 20% of the profits as commission.

So, why was Lao Duan so firm about bullish Bitcoin at that time?

His reason is simple: the value of something is given by the market. If more and more people believe it is valuable, it is valuable. Unlike randomly printed paper money, Bitcoin does not cause inflation, so it can be considered to allocate some paper money to Bitcoin. Moreover, according to the mechanism of Bitcoin halving every four years, November 28, 2012 is exactly the expiration date of the first four years. According to the laws of economics, an increase in demand and a decrease in supply will inevitably lead to a rise in price. However, the "unexpected guest" of Bitcoin, which originated in the virtual world, has developed much faster than the old-fashioned expectations under the promotion of the Black Swan event in the real world.

In early 2013, the President of Cyprus gave a speech announcing that the government would impose a deposit tax on local bank depositors in order to obtain emergency assistance loans from the European Union. As soon as the news came out, people rushed to the banks and rushed to exchange their currency for Bitcoin, causing the price of Bitcoin to soar from over $30 to $265 in just a few months.

Lao Duan felt tremendous pressure in this storm. Every morning when he woke up, he found that the net value of the Bitcoin fund was constantly reaching new highs, surging more than 10 times in 8 months. Friends who participated in the investment called him one after another, urging him to "sell quickly and take profits". Under such pressure, Lao Duan chose to liquidate the Bitcoin fund in April.

During a media interview, Lao Duan mentioned the reason for his early liquidation: "I think the rise of Bitcoin is coming to an end." After experiencing this fluctuation, Lao Duan began to doubt Bitcoin. He believed that "only when there are constantly newbies coming in, the price will continue to rise. Once there are no newbies coming in, it will immediately collapse." In the end, Lao Duan set a flag, stating that "he will not buy any more Bitcoin."

In November 2013, after liquidating the Bitcoin fund for five months, to everyone's surprise, Bitcoin surged again. However, at this time, Lao Duan gradually transformed from a Bitcoin evangelist to a critic. He published a landmark article this month titled "How Many More People Will Bitcoin, the'Faceless Man ', Devour?" In which he publicly broke with Bitcoin. Lao Duan bluntly stated in the article, "Bitcoin has gone crazy! We are witnessing the birth of a giant bubble."

He believes that the biggest difference between the Bitcoin bubble and other bubbles in history is that it is a global bubble. The future rise will shock everyone, and once it collapses, it will trap a large group of people. He emphasizes that this is not a prediction, but something that is bound to happen. He further points out that the essence of Bitcoin is very similar to "pyramid schemes". The upstream constantly eats the downstream, and the downstream must find a new downstream to profit. If a new downstream cannot be found, the entire system will collapse. The old end compares Bitcoin to the "faceless man" in "Spirited Away", believing that its greatest value lies in satisfying people's fantasy of "getting rich overnight".

In the article, Lao Duan summarized two truths about Bitcoin.
Firstly, for the vast majority of people, reasoning is useless. The real driving force is "jealousy". People will think, "Why can you get rich quickly while I can't?" So they take out their savings and buy Bitcoin without hesitation.
Secondly, for Bitcoin, whether it has practical applications or not is not important. What matters is how many players are willing to participate in this game. Whether it is good news or bad news, it is good news for Bitcoin. The most feared thing is no news.

In this way, Lao Duan parted ways with the Bitcoin world and instead promoted some counterfeit products. He rooted himself in the stock market and became a financial columnist. For a long time afterwards, Lao Duan did not publicly mention Bitcoin on social media, and the cryptocurrency community gradually forgot about him. Later, when people thought of Bitcoin evangelists in China, they would think of Wu Jihan, Li Xiaolai and others. In March 2021, Lao Duan mentioned Bitcoin again. He said that he owned four-digit bitcoins at most, worth billions of RMB, but most of them were sold after earning dozens of times. Now, he still has a three-digit "fraction" left, and these bitcoins are all in a bankrupt exchange - Mentougou.

Mentougou was once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. In 2014, it lost more than 850,000 bitcoins due to a hacker attack. Since 2019, Mt. Gox has been implementing a liquidation compensation plan, but the plan has been repeatedly postponed until July of this year, when Mentougou compensation work officially began and some creditors received compensation one after another. Unexpectedly, Mt. Gox, which was stolen and bankrupt, became the last Bitcoin steward of the early Bitcoin evangelists.

With the resurgence of Bitcoin, newbies continue to enter this market. What they remember are the current industry bosses and their legendary stories: Wu Jihan, Wu Gang, Shenyu, Xu Mingxing, Li Lin, Zhao Zhangpeng... And Lao Duan, the former Bitcoin pioneer, is thus submerged in the long river of Bitcoin history.

Okay, the second story is also finished. Both knew about Bitcoin in 2021. Who really missed Bitcoin, Zhihu girl Zhuzi or Lao Duan? In my opinion, there is no such thing as Zhuzi missing Bitcoin. This is also a misunderstanding of many people. Many people will mistake the information they have heard for investment opportunities they can grasp, such as attending a party and hearing someone recommend buying Bitcoin and NVIDIA, but you don't buy them...

Later, when Bitcoin and NVIDIA stocks skyrocketed, you felt like you missed the opportunity to get rich quick, and then exclaimed in Moments, "There was once an opportunity for financial freedom in front of you, but you didn't cherish it." I can only say that you are overthinking it, and this is not your opportunity. In fact, this information is only a part of the many information you receive every day. You haven't studied it deeply, let alone a lot of incorrect investment information that you have also forgotten. This is survivorship bias - you only remember those successful cases after the fact.

So, what is the real missed opportunity? It's when you spend a lot of time and energy researching, invest a huge amount of money, but still don't get any benefits.
For example, Lao Duan once conducted in-depth research on Bitcoin and received returns several tens of times. However, he got off early and turned against Bitcoin, missing out on the subsequent returns of several tens of times. This is a kind of missed opportunity. Why did Lao Duan, as a former believer, suddenly break away from Bitcoin? I dare to express my immature views here. When Lao Duan liquidated the Bitcoin fund in 2013, he firmly believed that the rise of Bitcoin had come to an end. In order to maintain the rationality of his judgment, he would start looking for various reasons to prove that his decision was correct. This psychological defense mechanism makes it impossible for him to objectively view the subsequent development of Bitcoin, just like when you break up with your lover, you hope he is not doing well.

However, later on, when the price of Bitcoin continued to rise, he could not admit that he had sold it and dared not buy it back at double or even higher prices, resulting in serious cognitive dissonance. In order to alleviate this psychological conflict, he chose to rationalize his exit decision by criticizing Bitcoin, describing Bitcoin as a "bubble" and "pyramid scheme" to alleviate his regret. It's like a person who, after breaking up, starts attacking their ex to rationalize their decision to break up.

As an early preacher and opinion leader, his "missing out" made him lose his voice over in the circle. Buying back meant admitting his previous judgment errors, which was a huge blow to his self-esteem. Moreover, after he transformed from a preacher to a critic, he gained new supporters and formed a new identity, which made it more difficult for him to admit his mistakes and change his stance. The new identity became his "cognitive shackle".

I think this may be the weakness of human nature, as well as a self-protection mechanism. When we face major judgment errors, we often choose to maintain our self-esteem by denying others rather than admitting our own mistakes. However, in the investment market, the market is always right, regardless of personal feelings. Maintaining an open mind is more important than sticking to prejudices, and admitting mistakes in a timely manner is wiser than adhering to them. This is also why I have always believed that when investing, do not blindly trust the advice of certain experts. Compared with ordinary people, their weaknesses are more obvious.

The more professional a person is, the easier it is to fall into certain cognitive biases and the harder it is to admit mistakes, especially when a person publicly expresses a certain position, which becomes part of their identity and the cost of changing their position becomes extremely high.

So, please remember, the market is always right, dare to admit mistakes.
Latest news