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Justin Sun mentioned in an interview with Phoenix Technology that investing in Tesla was his first pot of gold, and he later invested in Bitcoin and received generous returns. In this era of Internet finance, investment and finance have become the theme, and those who master the rules of the game have control over the lifeline of wealth. Sun Yuchen is undoubtedly very successful in this area. So what is the true appearance of the Bitcoin he invested in?
Justin Sun said, "Bitcoin does not really exist. It is the only currency in the world that has no physical form. I first learned about Bitcoin from an article in the New York Times on April 11, 2013. The Winklevoss brothers in this article are well-known "petitioners" in the United States. Because they pestered Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg was forced to pay them a large sum of money. The first thing they did with the money was to buy a lot of Bitcoin."
At that time, the price of Bitcoin experienced a round of increase. Although it was insignificant compared to now, it still attracted a lot of attention. Except for some geeks in the Bitcoin community who were discussing academic issues about Bitcoin, most people still believed that it was a thing dedicated to making money, just like a Ponzi scheme or the tulip bubble. So although I participated in the Bitcoin community in the United States, in the eyes of people around me, I was still doing something very lonely and unreliable. Because if you tell him that you are engaged in Bitcoin, he will feel like "Have you heard of Amway, sir?"
I was faced with two choices:
Option 1: Bet on Bitcoin and do something related to the Bitcoin community;
Option 2: Continue my studies at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
I was very conflicted about these two choices, because being treated as an Amway salesman is not a good experience. But in the end, I chose Bitcoin. When I watched the official video of Bitcoin, I noticed several core features of Bitcoin: decentralization, distribution, anonymity, and DeepWeb.
Decentralization and distribution mean the same thing. For the first time in human history, Bitcoin has achieved financial settlement without going through a central node. This may be very abstract, but I was very shocked when I came into contact with this concept. Because humans have always had no way to get rid of centralized nodes in the field of currency clearing and settlement. In our daily life, when we transfer money to each other, there is a central node to keep accounts for us: when people send money to each other, commercial banks keep accounts for us, and when commercial banks send money to each other, the People's Bank of China's clearing center keeps accounts for them. Our long-term habitual thinking is: the reason why any currency is valuable is because there is a sovereign state behind it to endorse it; the reason why any currency can be cleared is because there is a credible institution there to clear it.
I often use the democratic movement as an analogy to help everyone understand decentralized liquidation: the democratic movement is the first time in human history that P2P technology has been implemented in the political field. In the past, currency was ruled by the state, just like the entire country was liquidated through the king through centralized nodes. The king was the most important person in the country. Once the king was assassinated, the country would be in chaos. Similarly, if the central node of a network is destroyed, the network will be paralyzed.
For a person living in Voltaire’s time, it was hard to imagine that the king could be elected. Because everyone believed that the liquidation of centralized nodes was inherent, and if there were no centralized nodes, the entire country would be paralyzed. Voltaire was the first to tell everyone that we can actually use a democratic system to elect, and there will be no chaos without a king, and the efficiency may be higher than that of a king.
The founder of Bitcoin also made it clear that centralized nodes are not necessarily needed in the field of financial settlement. In the financial field, this is a very subversive concept, just like opening Pandora's box, and no one can close it anymore.
Another feature of Bitcoin is its strong anonymity. Its anonymity is so strong that every transaction can be hidden on the network without going through a central node. This made me realize for the first time that there is a dark Internet outside the Internet. Google, Tencent, Alibaba, etc., which we usually see, are all floating on the surface of the Internet. But in the deep Internet, there is also a dark Internet. There are many things in the dark Internet that ordinary people cannot access, such as pornography, gambling, and drugs. The market of this dark Internet is no smaller than that of the surface Internet. Many stories that happen every day in the dark Internet may exist in these anonymities.
When I first came into contact with Bitcoin, it was around 50 or 60 US dollars. Sometimes I was very happy when it rose to 60 or 70 US dollars. The overall market value of Bitcoin was between 500 million and 1 billion US dollars. At that time, I did a simple calculation. The annual valuation of the global dark Internet was about 2 trillion US dollars. The anonymity of Bitcoin solved the financial settlement problem very well. I thought that the market value of Bitcoin could easily increase by 100 times.
So I used all my tuition money for Pennsylvania to buy Bitcoin. Not long after that, Bitcoin grew wildly, which I didn't expect at the time. Of course, it plummeted later, which made many people feel depressed.
The trend of Bitcoin is very similar to a person's life. When you insist on doing something completely right, it is possible that your value will be zero for a long time. Even if you work hard to persist until there is a certain increase, you will often encounter great setbacks and reach the roof. But in fact, if you persist and keep working hard, you will find that the previous ones are all waves.
A successful life cannot be copied, but successful experiences can be learned. Sun Yuchen's progress from investing in Bitcoin to later founding Ripple Technology was inseparable from his courage and persistence to brave the wind and waves, and of course, his far-sighted strategic vision.
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