Bitcoin mining accident: When the grassroots dream of wealth is shattered

Source: Sanlian Life Weekly

They seek gold in the mining circle, relying more on the grassroots' extreme desire and intuition for wealth, their courage to move forward despite having nothing, and their "belief" in Bitcoin. However, the government's "clearance order" for Bitcoin mines issued on June 18, 2021 broke this belief.

Text | Song Si

Editor | Chen Xiao

Power outage in mine

Standing on a mountaintop in Ganzi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, overlooking the nearby valley, you can see the Yalong River winding eastward, like the Iffinger River in Norse mythology, dividing two worlds: on this side of the river is an ancient Tibetan village, with brown and white watchtowers and prayer flags surrounding the threshing ground fluttering under the blue sky; on the other side, there are three six-story silver steel structures, standing abruptly in the jungle. The roofs of the buildings are wrapped in a single silver, gray-black steel tile material on both sides, reflecting the restless light spots at noon in western Sichuan. Movement and stillness, primitiveness and modernity, nature and industry are absurdly and harmoniously intertwined and integrated here.

If you walk into these steel structures built in the post-industrial era, you can see hundreds of rows of iron frames arranged in an orderly manner, on which rectangular white iron boxes are placed in a somewhat messy manner. Two cooling fans wrapped in black material are exposed outside the iron boxes, and above and to the left and right of the fans, two or three thick white power cords are dragged outside the fuselage, like hungry claws.

In 2016, in a machine room near a hydropower station in Aba Prefecture, Sichuan, 550 mining machines were roaring day and night. The picture shows a worker checking the operation of the mining machine (Photo courtesy of Visual China (11.350, 0.06, 0.53%))

This is a small- to medium-sized Bitcoin mining farm. The Antminer S19 mining machine in the mine is one of the models with higher computing power. Its power consumption is 3250 watts per hour, which means it consumes 3.25 kWh of electricity per hour. In a day, a machine consumes nearly 80 kWh of electricity. This mine in Ganzi has a total of 5,000 Bitcoin mining machines with similar power, which consumes nearly 4 million kWh of electricity per day. In addition, it has 1,000 graphics cards and hundreds of A10PROs for mining Ethereum. When the mine is operating normally, the fan wall on the left side of each building will sound 24 hours a day, and it will echo through the valley together with the Yalong River not far away. The green power indicator lights on the bodies of thousands of mining machines are connected together, rising and falling like water.

The huge power-supported mining farm also generates amazing profits. According to the Bitcoin market price in June 2021, each S19 in this mine can generate about 149.62 yuan of income per day. After deducting the electricity cost of 29.64 yuan, the net income is about 119 yuan. The income of other machines is not low either. Even the graphics card machine 3070 with relatively low computing power can earn about 100 yuan a day. Roughly speaking, this mine can generate 700,000 yuan of income per day-this is the profit income when the Bitcoin price continues to fall.

However, these data representing wealth have become a thing of the past, and the mine is now dead silent. Since June 2021, it has been shut down due to power outages. When the mine was built last year, shareholder Wang Sheng and his partners invested more than 10 million yuan, but they have not yet made their money back. He told our reporter: "Even if it is sold at a low price of 3 million yuan now, no one will buy it. Because the most valuable part of the mine is the electricity resources. Now that there is no electricity, we can only sell the transformers and steel as scrap copper and iron, which can probably only sell for 100,000 yuan."

The reason for the power outage at the mine is the mine clearance policies that the government has introduced since May this year.

On May 21, the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council held its 51st meeting and clearly proposed to "crack down on Bitcoin mining and trading activities." Soon after, Yunnan, Xinjiang, and Qinghai successively issued policies to comprehensively rectify virtual currency mining companies. At that time, Sichuan's ban on Bitcoin mines had not yet been issued, and many mines had gradually moved their mining machines to Sichuan. "We are all waiting for Sichuan's policies, and everyone's expectations were originally optimistic." Wang Sheng told our reporter.

Illustration | Elizabeth

Sichuan Province is rich in hydropower resources. In April and May 2020, the governments of Ya'an, Ganzi and other places in Sichuan issued documents to develop hydropower consumption demonstration areas and develop the blockchain industry. With the construction and completion of consumption parks in various parts of Sichuan, the owners of the mines are convinced that the Sichuan Provincial Government supports the Bitcoin mining industry and is guiding it towards compliance.

In fact, since the first Bitcoin mine was built in 2013, Sichuan Province has had nearly 50% of the world's computing power resources at its peak. According to the estimate of the head of the China Digital Mining Association, before the "clearance order" was issued, there were at least 8 million kilowatts of computing power in Sichuan Province. The mining farms that share this computing power are scattered in Ya'an, Ganzi, Tianquan, Heishui, Xiaojin, Daocheng, Lingnan, Leshan, Muli, Lixian, Liangshan Prefecture and other places. The construction cost of each 10,000-kilowatt mining farm is between 3 million and 4 million yuan. If Sichuan is regarded as a large mining area, its total construction cost reaches 35 billion yuan. The headquarters of these mining farms are often located in Chengdu, which is why people in the Bitcoin circle call Chengdu the "capital of computing power."

But what no one expected was that on June 18, 2021, the Sichuan Provincial Development and Reform Commission and the Provincial Energy Bureau jointly issued the "Notice on Cleaning Up and Shutting Down Virtual Currency "Mining" Projects", requiring relevant power companies to identify and shut down all mining-related projects before June 20. Sichuan failed to become the last refuge for China's Bitcoin mines.

“Free” Bitcoin

Qin Peng is one of the first people in China to come into contact with the Bitcoin industry. After hearing about Bitcoin for the first time in 2012, he asked experts to do research on this "financial product" and decided to raise money to build a mine the following year. Originally specializing in futures trading, he keenly realized that although the peer-to-peer and decentralized concept of Bitcoin meets people's desire for freedom, from another perspective, absolute freedom without any organizational supervision will inevitably lead to the most primitive greed in human nature. In addition, the underlying technology of Bitcoin is safe enough to be used to match market capitalizations of hundreds of millions or even trillions. Both of these points point to the manipulability of Bitcoin. "It is precisely because Bitcoin is completely priced by the market like air, and no one can tell you exactly how much this thing is worth, so it can be worth whatever big capital wants it to be worth."

His judgment was soon confirmed. "In 2016-2017, there was a small group in China called 'WeChat Gang'. The share of Bitcoin held by this group accounted for a large part of the total amount of Bitcoin at that time. Therefore, the WeChat Gang in those two years could be said to be able to manipulate the price of Bitcoin. Whenever they heard that the government was going to suppress Bitcoin, this group would cash out first, and then use public opinion to create momentum, such as buying off the media to spread the news that 'Bitcoin is a scam', causing market panic and getting retail investors to sell. When the price of the currency has fallen almost enough, they will take the opportunity to buy at the bottom, use capital to raise the price of the currency, create another wave of momentum, and cash out at a high price. Today, such big capital still exists, but it is in the hands of the group of people on Wall Street." Qin Peng told the reporter of this magazine.

In Qin Peng's view, Bitcoin has no actual value, which is essentially the same as those short-lived virtual coins on the market. The only difference is that it appeared the earliest, has a strong symbolic meaning, and has the greatest market consensus, so it has formed a fairly high degree of recognition worldwide. Many civilian players firmly believe that Bitcoin will never return to zero, and the game related to it will continue forever.

Picture | Photo Network

Duan Chao, who also entered the mining circle in 2013 and has been engaged in the mining industry for 8 years, told our reporter that he believes that the country's crackdown on Bitcoin is mainly due to four considerations. The most direct reason is that China's "14th Five-Year Plan" includes a carbon neutrality energy conservation and emission reduction item. In the previous distribution map of China's mining industry, except for Sichuan, which has sufficient hydropower during the flood season and some areas in Qinghai, which have solar power, most other regions rely on traditional thermal power generation, which consumes a lot of electricity. Secondly, in addition to taxation, Bitcoin-related industries have not brought actual value to the country in terms of technology and industrial structure. Instead, they have attracted more and more real entrepreneurs to enter with capital, disrupting the real economy.

In addition, Bitcoin poses a threat to the stable financial order. 2020 is the first year of the issuance of the digital RMB. In April and May of the following year, the RMB exchange rate had a rapid appreciation stage. The national financial sector is very vigilant against market speculation on the expectation of RMB appreciation. The relevant financial channels involved in virtual currencies bypass national supervision and pose a great risk to the control of the RMB exchange rate. In addition, Bitcoin's momentum is too strong, causing countless small and medium-sized retail investors who do not understand the market to rush into the market, which also threatens the stability of the financial market and the property safety of the people (48.820, -0.58, -1.17%). Duan Chao believes that from this perspective, this time the country's crackdown on Bitcoin and related mining is a concentrated reflection of the central government's vigilance towards Bitcoin-related industries.

However, Bitcoin and its surrounding mining businesses are like the three-headed monster Cerberus that cannot be subdued by the River Styx. They have been growing tenaciously between personal desires and national policies. Every time a heavy blow from a policy has caused the industry to fall into a downturn, many players have entered the market against the market trend. These people have the same wild growth power as Bitcoin. They believe that in this mysterious business related to the future, there are indomitable opportunities and high profits hidden, which are difficult to compare with any traditional industry. As long as you keep calm and dare to fight, courage will be rewarded.

People in the mining circle

Yu Zimo entered the industry in October 2017, after the Bitcoin crash on September 4. He is 33 years old this year, with a delicate hairstyle and smart clothes. His skin has been dark and rough from years of wind and sun. When talking to strangers, he always dares not look them in the eye. He always purses his lips, and a pair of dimples appear from time to time, revealing a slightly shy student spirit that does not match his age and identity.

Yu Zimo told our reporter that he first heard the word Bitcoin on the "News Broadcast" one day. After further research online, he, who has done e-commerce business, keenly sensed the investment value in it: "At that time, I felt that it was backed by advanced blockchain technology, which might represent some future information development trend. Since there is such technical support, Bitcoin should be popular."

In fact, this may be all Yu Zimo knows about Bitcoin. He was born in a poor peasant family in Lezhi County, Sichuan Province. He did not receive much education and has an older brother and an older sister. Because his family was poor when he was young, his sister was sent to another family early on. The family relied on his father working as a temporary worker on construction sites all year round and his mother earning a meager income by washing clothes for others to make a living. Yu Zimo knew the pain brought by poverty from a young age: "I often didn't even have enough food to eat, and my clothes were always worn and altered by my brother. When I saw other friends wearing neat and beautiful clothes, I was very envious and a little inferior."

Picture | Photo Network

Due to his family's poverty, he was forced to drop out of school and work in his senior year of high school, even though he had excellent grades, outstanding basketball skills and was very popular in school. He still feels deeply regretful for not being able to take the college entrance examination. He feels that many of the misfortunes and regrets in his early life are directly related to economic problems. Later, Yu Zimo passed the adult college entrance examination and was admitted to a computer major in a junior college. After graduating successfully, he has been looking for an industry with a low entry threshold and that can quickly make people rich, so as to help himself and his family get rid of the shadow of poverty as soon as possible.

After deciding to enter the Bitcoin industry, Yu Zimo borrowed money from his friends and added all his savings to start speculating in Bitcoin. At that time, the country had just started to crack down on Bitcoin, and the currency value was extremely unstable. In less than a month, Yu Zimo's investment of more than 100,000 yuan was reduced to only 40,000 yuan. Although the loss was heavy, in the process of speculating in Bitcoin, he came into contact with the mining industry around the currency circle, "and then I knew that Bitcoin could be mined." After further understanding, he felt that the income of miners was more stable, and as long as the machine was running, he could make a profit every day, so he decided to buy a machine to mine.

At the beginning, he used a graphics card machine - he bought graphics cards from Digital Plaza, assembled several graphics card machines by himself, rented a house, and started mining coins. After two months of mining, the electricity bill alone cost more than 20,000 yuan. At the beginning, there was some profit, but in the third month, the price of the currency fell, and the electricity bill input was higher than the output. He sold the coins he mined and borrowed money from friends to raise 200,000 yuan. He bought several professional Antminers at a price of 30,000 yuan each. Based on the currency price at the time, Yu Zimo estimated that his payback period should be about three months. However, after buying the machine, the price of Bitcoin fell all the way, and the income still could not cover the cost of the machine and electricity. In March 2018, he had to sell all the mining machines in his hands at half price.

After understanding the difficulties of starting a business in the mining circle, Yu Zimo decided not to bear the mining costs and losses himself, but to cooperate with other existing mining farms and act as a middleman. The so-called middleman mainly helps the mining farm to attract investment, see which companies or individuals have mining machines that need to find a location for hosting, help both parties negotiate and sign contracts, and get commissions. This is a profession that looks very similar to sales in a physical enterprise, but because the income and profit scale of the mining farm are quite considerable, the commission that a successful Bitcoin mining farm middleman can get is much higher than the commission amount of physical sales.

A Bitcoin mine in Inner Mongolia in 2017 (Photo courtesy of Visual China)

Yu Zimo's first deal was extremely difficult. He was introverted and not good at dealing with people. It took him a whole week to negotiate the contract terms with the mining machine hosting party and the mining farm. He had to revise the contract details until late at night every day, and revised more than a dozen versions back and forth, which made him exhausted. On the day when the contract was finally signed, Yu Zimo's mentality was unexpectedly calm.

The final payment time agreed by both parties was 12 noon. At 11:45, when he received a text message from Bank of China, he was still sitting in his friend's car parked in the underground garage of a shopping mall, swiping WeChat as if nothing had happened, and only felt that a string of fate was trembling slightly. The text message reminded that 1 million yuan had been deposited into Yu Zimo's account, which was the deposit agreed by both parties. In other words, Party A agreed to entrust its tens of thousands of mining machines to the mine that Yu Zimo was recruiting agents for in the next year - his first business deal was concluded.

There was no ecstasy, no relief. Yu Zimo just suddenly remembered that he seemed to have not had a serious meal for several days. At this moment, he wanted to eat a bowl of Chongqing noodles. After eating noodles on the first floor of the mall, he went out and walked in the breeze of Chengdu in April. He smelled the fragrance of magnolia flowers in the hands of the old lady selling magnolias on the roadside, and suddenly thought of his mother who was in poor health, and his father who was nearly seventy years old and was still working as a temporary worker on the construction site, moving stones for others. He picked up the phone and called his mother, but burst into tears the moment he heard his mother's voice. That noon, he was walking and crying against the traffic and crowds on Tianfu Avenue, not caring about the surprised looks of passers-by. After crying for several minutes, he finally spoke: "Mom, my son is rich, and my son can finally support you."

Believe in it

One order, 1 million yuan in revenue, this is just a very small story of wealth creation in the Bitcoin industry. In the mining circle, there are more earth-shaking legends. Starting from the end of 2017, the price of Bitcoin first skyrocketed, and it was sluggish throughout 2018. It stopped falling and rebounded in 2019, plummeted on March 12, 2020, and then hit a record high at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. The fate of countless people has been ups and downs in this invisible currency fluctuation, but what people are more willing to see and spread are those myths of gaining wealth.

Sister Feng, who is in her 50s, was born in a remote rural area in Anhui Province. She only attended junior high school and got married at the age of 18. After getting married, she suffered a lot in order to give birth to a boy in accordance with local traditions. When the child grew up, a certain consciousness in her heart gradually awakened. She felt that she did not want to be buried in family trivialities for the rest of her life, so she came to Beijing Zhongguancun in 1997, starting with a computer business and opening an Internet cafe. In February 2017, she entered the mining circle and engaged in the sale of second-hand mining machines. In the past four years, the price of Bitcoin has experienced several rounds of ups and downs, and the price of mining machines has also fluctuated accordingly, but Sister Feng did not retreat but advanced. In the most difficult time, she even mortgaged her house and contracted 40,000 machines of a certain model of Avalon. When Bitcoin rose again, these 40,000 machines earned her more than 40 million yuan in net profit.

Bitcoin advertisements on the streets of Hong Kong on July 22, 2021

Feng Dan, who is in her 40s and has a junior high school education, is in the mining machine business. When the industry was in a downturn in March last year, she booked all the A10 machines newly produced by the mining machine manufacturing giant Ant Group that month, and then sold them in batches as the price of this model of mining machines increased, making 3 billion yuan in one year.

Xu Qiang, a high school dropout who worked as a toilet cleaner and posted advertisements, also made his first fortune by reselling mining machines, realizing his long-cherished dream of "crossing classes". Now, at the age of less than 30, he has become one of the shareholders of a large company whose mining farm computing power accounts for 1.5% of the world's total computing power.

During the interview, our reporter met several protagonists of Bitcoin wealth creation myths. Like Yu Zimo, they were born in poverty and did not receive higher education. In the mining circle, gold mining relies more on the grassroots' extreme desire and intuition for wealth, the courage to move forward despite having nothing, and the "belief" in Bitcoin. After all, for most people, it is not easy to believe in Bitcoin and bet all their wealth on it. Its rise and fall are too frequent and fierce, and it is difficult to measure decisions with some kind of ready-made financial knowledge or traditional wisdom of dealing with people.

Xu Qiang told our reporter that the mining machine reselling industry is one of the few businesses in China that has both huge profits and low entry barriers. Unlike real estate, medical care, film and television, and other industries that originally require huge entry funds, people who do mining machine business mainly make money by taking advantage of the lack of transparency of information in the circle and relying on information asymmetry: they accumulate a strong network of personal connections and learn where a certain model of mining machine is sold at the cheapest price at the first time; after the price of the machine rises, they can promptly connect with buyers who can consume this batch of machines.

With these connections, reselling mining machines is a lucrative business. It does not require a lot of capital investment, and you can stock up at low prices and sell at high prices. Therefore, many grassroots people who are not rich but have brains and emotional intelligence will choose to start by reselling mining machines, gradually accumulate resources and capital in the industry, and finally set up their own mining companies, open mines, and become "Bitcoin tycoons."

However, in the mining industry, it is more difficult to keep wealth than to gain it. This industry places particular emphasis on the exclusivity of personal connections. Therefore, mining machine vendors have to constantly make new friends in the mining industry, and their lives are often filled with socializing. In Xu Qiang's world, business negotiations, dinners and parties in the mining industry account for the majority, and he spends almost every night drinking in KTVs and nightclubs. This is both a way to comfort his insecure life and a helpless move for him to keep his resources and wealth.

But no matter how difficult or thrilling it is, in Fengjie's opinion, as long as you maintain a good attitude and keep your footing in this ever-changing industry, the countless dives or surges in the value of Bitcoin in the past few years are countless opportunities to turn 4 million into 40 million. This is a kind of belief - believe that Bitcoin must have an increasingly high consensus value worldwide; believe that in this industry with huge hidden profits, there will always be capital pouring in; believe that this industry will not die, and its price will definitely go back up. "Believe this, throw the acquired machines in the warehouse, relax your mentality, and wait for the price of the currency to rise again and the supply and demand relationship to change." Fengjie told the reporter of this magazine, "The key is to be patient and wait, and believe in what you do."

Persist or leave

But such a firm belief only existed before June 18, 2021.

After the release of the "Clearance Order", even someone as calm as Sister Feng still felt unprecedented anxiety in the face of the current mining winter. Not long ago, the 900 machines she purchased at 65,000 yuan per unit have now dropped to 30,000 yuan per unit. A boss from Wenzhou made a special trip to Sichuan to purchase the steel and transformers from the mine that had just been demolished at scrap prices, intending to sell them to other engineering projects. Sister Feng said that her company's losses in the past half month were no less than 600 million yuan. "We used to jokingly call mining machines chickens that can lay eggs. When the market was bad, even if the chickens couldn't be sold, at least they could be kept for laying eggs. But now, not only has the price of chickens fallen to a valueless level, but power outages have also prevented them from laying eggs. It's really unreal to see your tens of thousands of mining machines suddenly become scrap metal."

Going overseas has become the only option for most domestic mining companies to survive. Currently, there are several main destinations for going overseas: Central Asia, which is close and has sufficient coal and electricity, Russia, which is vast and sparsely populated, and North America, where laws and regulations are relatively sound. However, no matter where you go, there are great risks in hastily going overseas.

"There is a greater than 80% chance of falling into a trap wherever you go." A person in charge of the China Digital Mining Association told our reporter that mining machines going overseas face many risks and challenges: first, there is the problem of insufficient capacity. Even in China, there is no more electricity to provide, and the size of mining farms that can be accommodated overseas is even more limited; second, the cost issue. Overseas electricity prices are relatively high. The construction cost of 300,000 to 350,000 US dollars per megawatt in North America, the distribution profit ranging from 5% to 25%, and the electricity price of 0.5 to 0.6 yuan per kWh make most small and medium-sized mining companies discouraged. Even in Central Asia and Russia, where electricity prices are relatively cheaper, the electricity price has reached 0.38 yuan per kWh, which is much higher than the electricity price of 0.2 yuan per kWh in Sichuan. The subsequent operation and maintenance of mining farms and a large number of mining machines also require higher cost expenditures than in China. More importantly, overseas political and social factors are complex. In many places, the safety of mining machine assets is often not guaranteed. Many pioneers who went overseas to Central Asia and Southeast Asia have suffered losses.

A Bitcoin trading store in Istanbul, Turkey

Yu Zimo told our reporter that a friend sent a mining machine to Myanmar for mining, and the local armed forces directly sent several cars of people and took away everything. Someone else went to Russia to build a mine, but after it was built, the local police came with a piece of paper and drove him away. Later, I learned that this was actually a play performed by the police and the local partners. Someone else went to Kazakhstan to host a mining machine. The electricity bill contract that had been signed before the mining machine was delivered was torn up by the second landlord after the mining machine was delivered. The other party raised the price on the spot, and if you don’t agree, you won’t be connected to the electricity.

Even if these factors can be avoided, the establishment of a mining farm still involves complex matters such as docking resources, signing a power purchase agreement (PPA), building high-voltage equipment and mining farms, which takes a very long time. "Bitmain" is one of the largest Bitcoin companies in China. It mainly develops Bitcoin mining machine chips, and also does mining business and mining. Although capital and resources are abundant, its North American mine can only get a construction period of 8 months at the fastest, which means that its large number of mining machines need to be stagnant for at least 8 months.

Of course, not everyone sees these difficulties as insurmountable obstacles. Many people, especially those in the industry who have built large companies, see this "mine disaster" as a new wave of opportunities. Liang Bin, a person in charge of the China Digital Mining Association, told our reporter that from a positive perspective, the domestic government's "clearance order" can push China's mining industry out of its comfort zone and into larger overseas markets. Therefore, he prefers to see 2021 as the rise point of mining globalization.

However, mine owners like Yu Zimo, who have smaller mines and have not planned overseas resources in advance, have completely "fallen from heaven to hell" after the "clearance order" was issued. In March 2020, Yu Zimo also built his own mine. It was more of a rebellion against the monotonous life after becoming rich than an expansion of his career. After making his first pot of gold as a middleman in the mine, Yu Zimo also lived a life of revelry every night. During the day, he often stayed at home playing games, "buying skins" for every hero in "Honor of Kings", and spending tens of thousands of yuan to draw a virtual Maserati in the "Chicken Eating" game.

Of course, in the real world, he also bought himself a Maserati. But none of these things made him happier. He often recalled the sweetness of those poor days when he was a child at dusk. At that time, he wore his brother's old clothes that didn't fit him, and followed the older children to climb over the wall into the neighbor's orchard to steal oranges. Once the other party came with a stick to chase them away, they would scatter and wade across the small river at the entrance of the village to the other side, leaving the adults helpless. During the Chinese New Year, they would knock on the doors of the neighbors and say "Dragon is coming, dragon is coming, congratulations on your wealth." The adults in the door would give them one or two yuan, which was only a few cents in each child's hands. But at that time, he could look at the oranges or coins in his hand and laugh from the bottom of his heart. He couldn't figure it out: Now that he was rich and could finally support his parents, why did he feel less and less motivated?

Picture | Photo Network

"I feel like I can't find the meaning of life. Maybe I should make more money, otherwise I'll lose the goal and motivation of life." When he decided to build a mine in 2020, Yu Zimo borrowed a lot of money because most of the money he had earned before was squandered. The construction of the mine was repeatedly delayed due to funding issues, and it was not completed until July last year. But it was already the end of the flood season, and it was difficult to attract investment, so the mine had to remain idle.

Yu Zimo originally planned to recruit new investors in April and May this year during the flood season, and use his 200 mining machines to mine and accelerate his return on investment. However, when the new flood season arrived, what he waited for was not new business opportunities, but a power-off "clearance order" from the provincial government. The mine he painstakingly built became scrap copper and rotten iron. "No one is willing to buy such a mine without electricity, even if it is sold at cost price." What's more troublesome is that he owed a huge amount of money when building the mine, so he had to sell his beloved Maserati. But the 600,000 yuan in cash he got was far from enough to repay the more than 2 million yuan in debt.

At this time, Yu Zimo is reading the famous book "Siddhartha" by German writer Hesse, which was recommended to him by a friend who studied religious anthropology in the UK and whom he met last summer. In the book, Siddhartha was once swept into the bustling and noisy secular life, but in the process gradually felt isolated from the meaningful real life. After experiencing painful self-awareness, he chose to listen to the sound of the water attentively, and in the process of perceiving the sound of the water, he found the connection with himself and the world again. This story alleviated Yu Zimo's real pain, and he said that he saw himself in it——

"In 2019, I thought Bitcoin made me successful because it made me seem to have everything all of a sudden. But now that I have gone from being a rich man to having nothing, I realize that this process from zero to zero actually made me successful. It made me realize my limitations and increased my tolerance. Now, I just want to read more books, practice calligraphy, and spend more time with my parents. After paying off my debts, I want to study anthropology abroad, improve myself, and integrate into the bigger world. After I come back, even if the policy is relaxed, I don't want to continue working in this industry. I want to do something that is not just for making money for myself, but something that can truly create value for the entire society."

When he said this, Yu Zimo was driving on the winding mountain road in western Sichuan, leaving the Ganzi mine that he was once proud of. At the same time, his life was also rapidly leaving the mining circle where he had struggled for many years and brought him countless glory and loneliness. In the past four years, he has experienced the hustle and bustle and pride under the spotlight in the Bitcoin circle, and also felt the loneliness and hesitation after the lights went out; he has been nostalgic for the decadence and luxury, and has also experienced polishing and precipitation; he has made friends and been deceived. All of this is like the contradictory Bitcoin itself: the front is a utopian symbol used by idealists to shape a free future, but the back is a casino chip that capitalists use to suck blood by taking advantage of human greed. No matter what business opportunities and myths this circle will create overseas in the future, for Zimo, his dream of the mining circle that has lasted for four years and has been ups and downs has ended.