Li Shuo | I sold an S9 for 30,000 yuan

2019 and 2020 are the highlights of miners. Perhaps they don’t know what has suddenly attracted everyone’s attention. This group is also mixed, with clear distinctions. High-level miners include mining machine manufacturers, large conglomerates, and bosses of traditional enterprises, with a scale of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. Small and medium-sized miners include Internet cafe owners, SEG Electronics vendors, local thugs in third- and fourth-tier cities, as well as university professors and civil servants. The miner who will tell you about his experience today is a well-off miner.

I'm just a businessman

I am 32 years old this year. I have been an entrepreneur for four or five years before this. I am not considered a famous achievement, but at least I have a comfortable life. Unlike those unicorns with sky-high valuations, I only have one basic requirement when starting a business: the company must find a way to make money. My family lives in a county town in Zhejiang Province. Almost every household here has a factory, and the atmosphere of doing business is very strong. So I don’t have a tragic entrepreneurial temperament. I am just an ordinary businessman. I make electric scooters, and I only export them. The domestic electric scooter market is too chaotic. There is no industry standard. Small manufacturers are crowded and the prices are even more chaotic. After two years of doing business and having fixed customers, I started to do OEM for foreign merchants and do business with foreigners. After a long time, everything became more stable. At that time, I also accumulated some funds, so I thought about doing something else. Mining was purely accidental. If you want to talk about the source, it was when I went to the logistics company to ship goods and saw them packing a machine. They used the most expensive packaging of the logistics company and guaranteed a high price. I asked the salesperson, and they said it was a mining machine used to mine Bitcoin. Customers who bought this machine are very rich.

Before, I had only heard about Bitcoin, mostly from scattered news, and basically negative news. After I knew about the mining machine, I started to search frantically for what "mining machine" and "mining" were. It took me more than a week. I thought it was a good business. The logic is quite simple. Input, output, and income can all be calculated by formulas. It is definitely profitable. The most difficult step may be to find suitable electricity resources. My own relative has a logistics park in Inner Mongolia, which uses the government-agreed electricity price of about 0.26. I went to him to cooperate first, but later found that there were also problems. At that time, Inner Mongolia had begun to pay attention to "illegal use of electricity", especially "mining". The daily electricity consumption of the logistics park is very stable. Once there is an unreasonable fluctuation, the power supply bureau will come to check. Later, I heard that I could buy land in Urumqi to build a site myself, and the government would subsidize the electricity price, and the land price was very cheap. I have always been very cautious in dealing with the government. Although the cost is acceptable, the uncertainty is too high, so I gave up. In the end, I turned my attention to Gansu and Sichuan. After running around for about a month, I found a hydropower station in Sichuan with the help of my relatives. It was close to Tibet. When I went there, I wore a thin coat. The hydropower station employee who came to pick me up asked me to buy a down jacket, but I didn't buy it because it was troublesome. It started snowing after driving for five hours into the mountains, and I was shivering with cold. The power station owners here all know about mining, and the contracts are ready. I just took a quick look and signed a contract with the boss to confirm the site. I still have to thank the local relatives. On the day of signing the contract, I invited the power plant owner to dinner and drank half to death. Miners are really good at drinking, this is true.

At that time, you had to find a mining machine dealer to buy a machine, and the price changed every day. The more powerful mining machine dealers would not even sign a contract with you, and you had to pay in full. You could buy it or not. It was completely different from our usual business. I tried to find the manufacturer directly, but found that the manufacturer ignored me and it was basically sold out in seconds when I went to the official website. I thought finding a site was the most difficult, but I didn’t expect that buying a machine was also difficult. I couldn’t even spend the money. Seeing the price of the currency rising day by day, the venue was also urging me to install the machine, so I could only increase the price and buy a batch of machines from the second-hand dealer. It was a seller’s market at that time, and they had the final say on when to ship. Now I think about it, my brain was actually quite hot at that time. Once a person enters that fanatical environment, he can’t calm down, especially if he has invested a lot of time. I would like to sum up this first mining experience with the word "lucky". First, I successfully found a site. Second, I didn’t encounter any scammers when buying the machine. Third, I quickly recovered my investment and escaped the top. The price of the currency rose to a price that I thought was "terrible" in the more than half a year after I installed the machine, and an S9 was actually sold for 30,000 yuan. I immediately decided to sell all the futures machines I had and the second-hand machines on the shelf. I made a lot of money from the coins and the machines, much more than what I made from the electric scooter business. Now that I think about it, there is really no other word to describe it except lucky. Because not long after I sold the machines, the market started to plummet. When I first entered this industry, I didn’t think it was crazy. Later, when the rate of return was more than ten times or even a hundred times, my first reaction was "scary". In ordinary industries, a business that can pay back the investment in one year is already considered high profit, but in the cryptocurrency world, a thousand yuan can become one million yuan. The scene that appeared in my dream can actually come true. It's crazy.

I'm not a believer

I think I still deliberately keep a little distance from this industry, otherwise I can't make a living. This industry is very extreme, full of legends and chaos. It's easy to lose judgment. I just think mining is a good business, and it's also because of this opportunity that I actively learn about what Bitcoin and blockchain are. But I think these metaphysical things are still a bit far from ordinary people. It's a waste of time to popularize what blockchain and Bitcoin are to many people. The official public opinion environment is not friendly now. If you mention Bitcoin to others, everyone will think you are a liar. If you talk too much, they will think you are brainwashed, so I just don't talk about it. If you tell them that mining can pay back in one or two years, or that you make money by buying coins, they will slowly understand. "Making money in silence" is the most appropriate way to describe mining. I made a lot of money in my first mining experience, but later I lost a little because I couldn't help but buy some coins after the machine was cleared, and I was trapped. Friends around me have made tens of millions by buying altcoins, and some bolder ones have made hundreds of millions. But later on, I saw that a lot of the money that I earned by luck was lost through my own ability.

In 2018, we encountered a big bear market. Although I lost some money, I used part of the profit to buy spot goods, so overall I was still profitable. And my own scooter business did not stop. Mining is my second business. It may be a necessary process to encounter a bear market. After all, there are gains and losses in doing business. You can't say that I don't believe in it at all. I am still very grateful to Bitcoin. It allows me to see a different world.

I am different from those who trade in coins

Friends who trade in cryptocurrencies are quite crazy. At the beginning, it was OK. I bought some spot and stocked up some coins. Later, I learned to trade in contracts. This thing is addictive. Now every exchange has teachers who guide orders, and there are many in WeChat groups. I am a miner. The coins mined by miners are very precious. I can't bear to sell them, let alone lose money in contract trading. I will be heartbroken. Friends who trade in cryptocurrencies around me spend a lot of time every day in WeChat groups and QQ groups, and there are various small circles for fees. Some of them don't even have a proper job to trade in cryptocurrencies full-time. To be honest, I look down on them a little bit. It's no different from gambling. They just dream of getting rich overnight with a small bet for a big gain, and they shout every day that they are in the blockchain and want to change the world. If you ask them in detail whether they have made money, most of them have lost money. And they may have been cheated by many scammers. In short, they are a bit opportunistic.

Although I also bought coins, I don't gamble, and I have never stopped mining. The bear market was very difficult, but fortunately I had cash flow. When the S9 dropped to 700 yuan and the L3 was 500 yuan, I put about 3,000 machines on the shelves. Although the price of the machines continued to fall after I bought them, I was a person who sold S9 for 30,000 yuan. I bought it back for 700 yuan, and even if it fell to 500 yuan in the end, I felt that I made a profit. Facts have proved that I was right. You see, this batch of machines made me money again.