How I Missed Becoming a Billionaire Three Times

Hello everyone, it is November 22, 2024, and the price of Bitcoin is about to break through the $100,000 mark, but I feel very bitter. Because I came into contact with Bitcoin as early as 2012, but missed the opportunity to become a billionaire three times. Want to hear my sad story?

The first story is that I missed Bitcoin. When Bitcoin just became popular in 2012, I spent a lot of time studying Bitcoin, and I also drove a high-end iMac computer to mine crazily for a while. But I was too proud at the time. I think this thing has no real value except for cross-border money laundering. I was the CTO of CSDN at the time. I thought serious people should make mobile Internet apps, why do opportunistic things? I gave up after playing for a few months, and even deleted my Bitcoin wallet later. I really treated the Bitcoin in my wallet like trash.

And one of my good friends had failed in his business many times at that time. In the end, he spent tens of thousands of yuan to assemble a server at home and mined day and night, and the electricity bill was very high. At the most, he had five-digit Bitcoins. Although he later lost more than half of his money in the mining farm, he was financially free early and enjoyed his life. This was the first time I brushed shoulders with a billionaire. Back in 2012, even if I did nothing, it would be enough to concentrate on accumulating servers for mining.

The second story is that I brushed shoulders with Ripple. I left CSDN and returned to Shanghai during the National Day holiday in 2013, planning to start my own business. My former boss, Jiang Tao, the founder of CSDN, found me and said that cryptocurrency had a bright future. Many people in China had already started Bitcoin, but no one in China had started altcoins. Ripple wanted to enter China and set up a gateway in China. The so-called gateway is the payment network of cryptocurrency, which can be roughly understood as the predecessor of TRON created by Justin Sun.

So Jiang Tao introduced me to the founding team of Ripple at the time, and I spent a month studying how to build a gateway for Ripple. After reading the technical information of Ripple and having completed the first version of the gateway prototype, I came to a conclusion: this thing is too fucking rubbish from a technical point of view, far inferior to Bitcoin. If Bitcoin was rubbish at the time, Ripple was simply a fighter among rubbish. Such a rubbish thing, it can't have a future. So I gave up decisively and turned to start an O2O business.

According to the data, Sun Ge of Tron started to work on Ripple in November 2013, which was the same time as me. But because I really disliked the technical rubbish of Ripple and was not optimistic about it at all, I gave up after playing for more than a month. And Sun Ge, even Mr. Buffett teased him a few years later. This was the second time I missed the billionaire. A few years later, Ripple became popular, and my friend who mined Bitcoin for wealth and freedom came to ask me: Didn’t you work on Ripple before? Did you make money now? I rolled my eyes at him: What the hell, I haven’t played Ripple for a long time.

The third story is that I missed Ethereum. In 2015, after I finished my O2O startup, I came to Dingxiangyuan in Hangzhou. It happened that a good friend who had been in Hangzhou for many years was pushing Ethereum like crazy, and he planned to look for startup opportunities in the direction of Ethereum. I was also very interested in Ethereum at the time, so I talked to him for a long time. I still remember one night in the fall of 2015, we talked until two or three in the middle of the night. The question I repeatedly asked him was: What is the use of Ethereum? The conclusion of that night's thorough discussion was that Ethereum could not see opportunities in other industries except finance. So I gave up studying Ethereum. And he simply thought that Bitcoin was already very expensive and Ethereum was very cheap, so he hoarded a lot of Ethereum.

A few years later, this friend who was engaged in Ethereum had become financially free and his family immigrated to Singapore. He likes to say in our group: He is actually not worthy of the position. But I just want to spit blood. This is the third time I have brushed shoulders with a billionaire.

In twelve years, I missed becoming a billionaire three times. At this time, what came to my mind was Liu Huaqiang's classic line: I gave you the opportunity but you didn't use it!

In fact, I have been at the forefront of technology development for a long time and have been exposed to these opportunities earlier than ordinary people. This is very lucky, but why didn't I seize them once? It's because of my arrogance! Because I had successfully started a business in my early years and later served as an executive of an Internet company, my judgment on the path to success had been solidified in my mind. I didn't look down on the grassroots cryptocurrency field at that time and thought it was not up to standard:

For example, I think that Bitcoin, as a digital currency with deflationary properties, can never become a currency and can only provide money laundering value; for example, I think Ripple's technology is too rubbish and has too many loopholes; for example, I think Ethereum has no future except in the financial field. Until this year, I had a completely negative attitude towards the entire cryptocurrency. I thought it was just a digital casino.

But this year, in early 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission included Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in the US stock market. I had to admit that I was slapped in the face by the facts: when the global mainstream capital market has recognized and accepted Bitcoin, what arrogance do you have?

Why did I miss three opportunities to become a billionaire in these twelve years? And every time I got up early and caught up late? Seeing that I was starting at the same time, or my friends around me were riding away? I want to say that a famous saying from the science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem" is the answer:

Weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival, but arrogance is.