Bitcoin breaks through $110,000. Regrets and misses in those years

May 22 was the 14th anniversary of Bitcoin Pizza Day. On that day, Bitcoin broke through $110,000, setting a new record.

That is to say, in the 15 years after 2010, you will not lose money if you buy Bitcoin at any time. Bitcoin has never let anyone down.

I guess many friends are like me. Maybe I have seen a lot of sighs and lamentations in the circle of friends, telling stories about how they missed Bitcoin and how they sold Bitcoin.

For example, my colleague once sold 10 bitcoins to pay the rent, followed by all kinds of sighs, alas, if I had bought bitcoins back then, if I had insisted on holding on...

At such times, many people attribute the wealth of early bitcoin investors to pure luck, saying that they just "knew it earlier", as if "knowing it earlier" must be equal to "getting rich".

Today, I want to talk to you about two stories,What is the real missing of Bitcoin, and why missed Bitcoin?

The first story is about Zhihu girls and Bitcoin.

You should have seen such an answer on Zhihu. On December 21, 2011, a female college student asked a question on Zhihu, "A junior student has 6,000 yuan on hand. What are some good financial investment suggestions?"

On the same day, a netizen named "blockchain" replied: "Buy Bitcoin, save the wallet file, and then forget that you ever had 6,000 yuan. Check it out in five years."

The answerer is Chang Qia, an early Bitcoin evangelist and founder of Babbitt.

Since then, whenever Bitcoin has risen sharply, netizens have flocked to the comment area, tirelessly telling the questioner how much Bitcoin is worth now if they had bought it. The latest data is that if the questioner had bought all 6,000 yuan in Bitcoin at that time, he could have bought more than 300 Bitcoins, and the total value is now 33 million US dollars, 230 million RMB.

So, the question is, did the questioner buy Bitcoin in the end?

Hey, actually I know the follow-up. When I was working in Beijing in 2018, I happened to contact this questioner on Zhihu, let's call her Zhuzi for now, and then my colleague did an exclusive interview with her.

The final answer is no.

She did not make any investment. In the spring of 2012, she took a 6,000 yuan scholarship and went to Hangzhou and other places with her friends for a week.

Since then, every time Bitcoin has risen sharply, the comments that continue to emerge under this question seem to always remind her that you have missed the opportunity to get rich.

But Zhuzi still has not bought Bitcoin. Although she regretted it later, she believes that "if I were still the same person at that time, I would still make the same choice as seven years ago." In Zhuzi's view, people's personalities are there, just like the characters in novels. Behaviors are derived from the characters and will not change much.

Then the question is, do you think Zhuzi missed Bitcoin? If you were Zhuzi, would you regret it late at night?

Let’s not talk about it for now, and share the second story with you.

The protagonist of the second story is also an Internet celebrity. Some people who like to trade stocks should 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 saw Bitcoin for the first time on Google Reader and was immediately attracted to it. He once described Bitcoin as "a weapon for losers to counterattack in the geek world."

Lao Duan recalled the scene at that time. He felt that geeks had created new inventions in the virtual world again. He compared Bitcoin to "stones on the Stone Coin Island". Here is a knowledge point to add. Everyone should take notes. The Stone Coin Island refers to Yap Island in the western Pacific Ocean. On this island, the currency is stone. These stones are a few centimeters in diameter, a few meters in diameter, and weigh several tons. Therefore, it is impossible to carry them with you. They are simply placed there. The ownership is recorded through oral transmission, and the transaction is based on consensus and collective memory. It is considered to be one of the earliest "virtual currency" systems. The currency system of the Stone Coin Island demonstrates an important economic principle: the value of currency does not lie in its physical form, but in social consensus and trust system.

Back to Lao Duan, at the beginning of Bitcoin, Lao Duan became one of the evangelists of Bitcoin in China.

In July 2011, Lao Duan wrote the first article related to Bitcoin, titled "What can appreciate 3,000 times in a year". In this article, he mentioned that as a currency system that is independent of the government's will, the value of Bitcoin depends entirely on the trust and demand of the market. He believes that the total limit of 21 million can effectively prevent counterfeiting and copying, while the 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, "The current price of a Bitcoin is only 100 yuan, even if all the losses are only a meal, but if the number of Bitcoin users expands to tens of millions in the next few years, then on average everyone will not even get one coin, and then you will be considered rich if you have one coin."

In 2025, when Bitcoin breaks through $110,000, looking at this expression again, it is indeed a golden word of advice.

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

In July 2012, the price of Bitcoin hovered around $7, and Lao Duan decided to establish a Bitcoin fund "Lao Duan Bitcoin No. 1", which was also the first Bitcoin fund in China. Due to legal and market risks, this fund did not raise funds from the public. The total scale of the first phase of funds was 100,000 yuan, 40% of which came from Lao Duan himself, and the remaining 60% came from friends around him.

Lao Duan publicly promised that if Bitcoin disappeared or its value returned to zero, he would fully compensate investors. As a fund manager, he does not charge management fees, but only 20% of the profit as commission.

So why was Lao Duan so firmly bullish on Bitcoin at that time?

The reason he gave was simple: the value of a thing is given by the market. If more and more people believe that it is valuable, it is valuable. Unlike randomly printed paper money, Bitcoin will not cause inflation, so you can consider allocating part of the 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 law of economics, increased demand and reduced supply will inevitably lead to price increases.

However, Bitcoin, an "uninvited guest" native to the virtual world, has developed much faster than Lao Duan expected, driven by the black swan events in the real world.

In early 2013, the President of Cyprus gave a speech, announcing that in order to obtain emergency aid loans from the European Union, the government would impose a deposit tax on local bank depositors. As soon as the news came out, people flocked to banks and rushed to exchange their currencies for Bitcoin, causing the price of Bitcoin to soar from more than 30 US dollars to 265 US dollars 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 setting new highs, soaring more than 10 times in 8 months. Friends who participated in the investment called him and urged him to "sell it quickly and stop while you are ahead." Under such pressure, Lao Duan chose to liquidate the Bitcoin fund in advance in April.

In an interview with the media, Lao Duan mentioned that the reason for his early liquidation was: "I think this round of Bitcoin's rise is coming to an end."

After experiencing this fluctuation, Lao Duan began to doubt Bitcoin. He believed that "only if there are new people pouring in, the price will continue to rise. Once there are no new people coming in, it will collapse immediately."

Finally, Lao Duan set a flag, saying "I will never buy any more Bitcoin."

In November 2013, five months after Lao Duan liquidated the Bitcoin fund, Bitcoin rose again to everyone's surprise.

However, at this time, Lao Duan gradually changed 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 the article, he publicly "broke up" 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, and the future increase will shock everyone, and once it collapses, it will trap a large group of people. He emphasized that this is not a prediction, but something that is bound to happen.

He further pointed out that the essence of Bitcoin is very similar to "pyramid selling", where the upper house constantly eats the lower house, and the lower house must find a new lower house to make a profit. If no new lower house can be found, the whole system will collapse. Lao Duan compared Bitcoin to the "faceless man" in "Spirited Away", and believed that its greatest value lies in satisfying people's fantasy of "getting rich overnight".

In the article, Lao Duan summarized two truths about Bitcoin.

First, for the vast majority of people, reasoning is useless, and the real driving force is "jealousy". People will think: "Why can you get rich, but I can't?" So they take out their savings and buy Bitcoin without hesitation.

Second, for Bitcoin, whether it has practical applications is not important, what is important is how many buyers 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, turned to promote some altcoins, and took root in the stock circle and became a financial columnist.

For a long time afterwards, Lao Duan did not publicly mention Bitcoin on social media, and the currency circle gradually forgot about him, so that when people later 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 at most he had four-digit bitcoins, worth billions of RMB, but most of them were sold after earning dozens of times. Now, he still has three-digit "fragments" 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 begun to implement a liquidation compensation plan, but this plan has been postponed again and again. It was not until July this year that the compensation work of Mentougou was officially launched, and some creditors have received compensation one after another.

Unexpectedly, the stolen and bankrupt Mt. Gox became the last Bitcoin steward of the early Bitcoin evangelists.

With the rise of Bitcoin again, newcomers continue to pour into the market. What they remember are today's industry leaders and their legendary stories: Wu Jihan, Wu Gang, Shenyu, Xu Mingxing, Li Lin, Zhao Changpeng... And Lao Duan, the former Bitcoin pioneer, was drowned in the long river of Bitcoin history.

Okay, the second story is over.

Both knew about Bitcoin in 2021. Who really missed Bitcoin, Zhihu girl Zhuzi or Lao Duan?

In my opinion, Zhuzi did not miss Bitcoin.

This is also a misunderstanding of many people.Many people will mistake the information they have heard for investment opportunities that they can grasp. For example, when you attend a party, you hear someone recommend buying Bitcoin and Nvidia, but you didn’t buy them…

Later, when Bitcoin and Nvidia stocks skyrocketed, you felt that you missed the opportunity to get rich, and then lamented in your circle of friends, "There was once an opportunity for financial freedom in front of you, but you didn’t cherish it”

I can only say that you think too much. This is not your opportunity.

In fact, this information is only part of the many pieces of information you receive every day. You have not studied it in depth, not to mention that there are also a lot of wrong investment information that you have forgotten. This is the survivor bias - you only remember those successful cases afterwards.

So, what is the real miss? It is that you have spent a lot of time and energy to study and invested a huge amount of money, but still have not obtained any benefits.

For example, Lao Duan once studied Bitcoin in depth and obtained dozens of times of returns, but he got off the train early and turned against it, missing out on the dozens of times of returns of Bitcoin afterwards.

This is a kind of miss.

Why did Lao Duan, a former believer, suddenly break with Bitcoin?

I would like to express my immature views here.

After 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 began to look for various reasons to prove that his decision was correct.

This psychological defense mechanism prevented him from looking at the subsequent development of Bitcoin objectively, just like when you break up with your lover, you hope that he will have a bad life.

But later, when the price of Bitcoin continued to rise, he could not admit that he had sold it at a high price, nor did he dare to buy it back at one or two times or even higher prices, which resulted in serious cognitive dissonance.

In order to ease this psychological conflict, he chose to rationalize his decision to withdraw by criticizing Bitcoin, describing Bitcoin as a "bubble" and "MLM" to alleviate his regret,just like a person who starts attacking his ex after breaking up to rationalize his decision to break up.

As an early evangelist and opinion leader, his "missing the opportunity" made him lose his voice in the circle. Re-buying means admitting his previous misjudgment, which is a huge blow to his self-esteem.

Moreover, after he changed from an evangelist to a critic, he gained new supporters and formed a new identity. This identity change made it more difficult for him to admit his mistakes and change his position.

The new identity has become his "cognitive shackles".

I think this may be the weakness of human nature, and also a self-protection mechanism. When we face major misjudgments, we often choose to maintain our self-esteem by denying the other party rather than admitting our mistakes.

But in the investment market, regardless of human feelings, the market is always right. It is more important to keep an open mind than to stick to prejudices, and it is wiser to admit mistakes in time than to persist in them.

This is why I have always believed that when investing, you must not blindly believe in the advice of certain experts. Compared with ordinary people, their weaknesses are more obvious.

The more professional you are, 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 position, which becomes part of his identity and the cost of changing his position becomes extremely high.

So, please remember, the market is always right, and you should be brave enough to admit your mistakes.