How many Korean losers have become rich by using Bitcoin?

A few days ago, Luna coin, which was jokingly called the "Moutai of the cryptocurrency circle", collapsed.

In just one month, the price of Luna coin dropped from $119 to less than $0.0002, a drop of 99.99%, causing countless people to lose all their money overnight.

This includes at least 200,000 Koreans.

According to the Chosun Ilbo, as Luna coin plummeted, the number of people searching for "Mapo Bridge" in Korean on Google increased sharply.

The Mapo Bridge is one of the most famous suicide sites in South Korea.

Mapo Bridge

And it seems that someone has already taken action.

On June 29, South Korean police fished out three bodies from a water port in Wando County - a couple and their 10-year-old daughter.

According to investigations, the couple most likely chose to commit suicide with their daughter due to investment failure, and their investment target was the Luna coin, which was at a high price at the time.

Car recovered from suicide scene

Why are so many Koreans investing in cryptocurrencies? And why are they so crazy about it?

I decided to look around Korean cryptocurrency forums to find the answer.

Bitman, DC Inside, Coinpan... If you want to summarize these Korean cryptocurrency BBSs in one sentence, it would be:

A record of the dream-chasing lives of Korean losers

Most of the Koreans who speak on these forums are young men who are not very old, have low incomes, and live with their parents.

In addition to cryptocurrency trading, their favorite thing is to fantasize about beautiful women.

Occasionally, they would even upload their own records of being scumbags.

· Arrested for abducting elementary school students, what a rotten person

Such a group of people naturally won’t discuss big concepts such as the decentralized value of Bitcoin or the impact of blockchain on the future of WEB3.0. They only care about one thing:

How to make money from cryptocurrency trading, or, as they say, how to “graduate.”

The so-called "graduation" can be roughly understood as "making enough money", which means that after making a specific amount of money from cryptocurrency trading, you choose to stop.

In those "graduation farewell posts", the posters will share their trading experiences, and some will even hold cash draws to give back to netizens in exchange for everyone's blessings and jealousy.

So how do you “graduate”?

In these Korean cryptocurrency forums, technical analysis is the absolute mainstream.

You can see cryptocurrency charts plastered all over the walls of the rooms of those lonely people who died alone in South Korea.

You can also see in the forums that some cryptocurrency traders are obsessed with the ups and downs of the charts, claiming that they see human faces and cute animals in them, and regard them as a good sign for a big rise.

The effect of technical analysis does not seem to be very good.

Posts that "graduate" because of making money are rare, but in contrast, posts that "fail" because of losing money are everywhere.

Generally speaking, these swear-filled, desperate records of losses can be divided into three categories.

First comes rage.

When a big wave of losses comes, Korean cryptocurrency traders will start smashing things.

Or smash the screen of the tablet or monitor at hand.

Or just take the refrigerator door off and throw the fan against the wall.

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Some people even smash their own window glass until their fists bleed.

When the initial anger subsided, Korean cryptocurrency traders began to complain and write short essays on forums, the content of which was quite consistent with the "gambler template":

Someone lost 2.5 billion won and didn’t know how to tell his parents who had high blood pressure;

Some people, even though they have lost everything, still shamelessly borrow money from their parents;

Someone invested the money that was intended for starting a convenience store business in Bitcoin, and lost it all. Now he doesn’t know what to do next.

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Others, after a bear market, simply think that "it would be better to die."

On the Bitcoin discussion board of DC Inside, the word "suicide" appears once every few pages on average.

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For example, there was a 31-year-old guy who lost 150 million won in cryptocurrency trading. He used his last bit of money to buy three bottles of soju and some cigarettes, intending to enjoy them before "reopening."

Because the weather was too cold, the guy only drank two bottles of soju before he lost the courage to commit suicide.

He returned home and started watching anime, claiming that he was healed by the two-dimensional world.

Next, he prepared to start over, and the first step was to borrow money from his mother.

“Win means wealth and glory, lose means suffering on the streets.” On the Internet, the young generation of cryptocurrency traders in South Korea may be the most steadfast practitioners of these two sayings.

However, if you look at South Korean society as a whole, you will find that the craze for cryptocurrency is by no means limited to young people in their twenties and thirties.

In the past, some high schools in South Korea had to introduce policies to prohibit their students from purchasing or using school computers to mine Bitcoin.

In the past, in June last year, a virtual currency fraud case involving 3.85 trillion won broke out in South Korea, and most of the victims were elderly people.

Around 2017, one-fifth of the world's Bitcoin transactions took place in South Korea. At the craziest time, the sales price of Bitcoin in South Korea was even 20% to 40% more expensive than the international market, which was an extremely serious premium.

Today, there are 100,000 people in this country who hold virtual assets worth more than 100 million won, and 20% of Internet cafes are mining day and night.

Rumors have spread from the Seoul Football Club that players have stopped focusing on playing football because they are addicted to cryptocurrency trading; the Korean novel "Where We Want to Go", which tells the story of getting rich by speculating in cryptocurrency, became a national hit as soon as it was released.

Where does this madness of everyone speculating in cryptocurrencies come from, and why does this madness last so long?

In a nutshell, Koreans are not only obsessed with cryptocurrencies. Anything related to speculation (note, not investment) can trigger a frenzy in this country.

In the secondary market, South Korean retail investors just went all in on crude oil in March this year, pouring an unprecedented 18 billion won into a Russian ETF.

In the homes of many Koreans who died alone, the police found hundreds of lottery tickets, and among Korean office workers, there is a saying that goes:

"I always have two pieces of paper with me when I go to work. One is my lottery ticket, and the other is my resignation letter."

Lottery videos on YouTube

The most amazing thing is that according to a report by SEIBro4 in May this year, Samsung Electronics now has more than 350,000 shareholders under the age of 20. At the company's shareholders' meeting this year, people even saw elementary school students.

In 2017, when Bitcoin was creating a whirlwind in South Korea, many Korean media outlets selected “가즈아” as the word of the year.

Translated into Chinese, this word is equivalent to "chong ya" - it often appears in contexts related to speculation.

When stocks and Bitcoin soared, speculators on social media would send large quantities of emojis with the words "가즈아" on them, like chanting a mantra, praying that the rise would continue.

When a crash comes, speculators will also send out "가즈아", but they will add the words "Han River (한강)" in front of this word to show that they want to die.

Hidden behind all these crazy speculative behaviors is a rather frustrating fact:

Speculation may be the only way for Koreans, especially the current generation of young Koreans, to turn their lives around.

As written in the book "From Miracle to Mirage", since the Asian financial crisis in 1997, after labor reforms and the legalization of large-scale layoffs, the narrative of "you can get rich as long as you work hard" can no longer continue to apply in Korean society.

What replaced it was a “new normal” of slow income growth and highly unstable jobs.

Along with this, there is also a rapid increase in the polarization between the rich and the poor:

The top 10% of South Koreans account for 59% of the total income of all people; the houses that wealthy families from the "gold spoon" class can buy in Seoul are impossible for ordinary families from the "earth spoon" class to afford in their lifetime.

This situation directly pushes the mentality of young Koreans to two extremes:

On one hand, it is the pursuit of ultimate stability.

In the job-seeking intention survey report released by the Korea Employers Federation this year, the number of young people who want to become civil servants accounted for 36.8% of the total.

Civil servants are known as "God's workplace" in South Korea and are an absolute "iron rice bowl".

On the other end, it's all in one life.

From 2003 to 2008, the number of individual fund accounts in South Korea increased more than sixfold, and today the number of individual investors in the country exceeds one-fifth of the population.

At the beginning of the year, Cookie News conducted a survey, and 60% of Korean respondents were positive about making profits from stocks, lotteries and Bitcoin.

"Mass investment culture", "No negotiation in investment", "Bitcoin's nuclear explosion point", and other such phrases describe Koreans' enthusiasm for investment and their desire to change their own destiny.

So, when a "low-income earner" finds out that his total income after working hard and overtime for a year is only one-third of the monthly salary of a "high-income earner", will he choose to be content with the status quo, or choose to gamble everything he has?

The answer is already apparent.

That’s why, in late 2017, when South Korean officials were preparing to introduce policies to restrict Bitcoin transactions, they received a petition signed by 280,000 netizens opposing the policy.

On the cryptocurrency forum Bitman at the time, there was a post related to the petition that was pushed to the top by people. The poster wrote in it:

Thanks to Bitcoin, we can now dream a dream of happiness that we have never had before.

I might be able to own my own house in this country where houses are ridiculously expensive.

I might be able to make a living while doing what I want to do...

The South Korean government says the regulations are necessary to protect people from high-risk gambling, but we think they rob us of our dreams.

Please don't take away our hopes and dreams.

As a result, more and more Koreans stood on the edge of the cliff called speculation, took a leap, and without hesitation, they would either soar into the sky or be crushed to pieces.