#ETH巨鲸增持 Old Zhang drank too much yesterday and suddenly started talking to me about that incident five years ago.

In 2019, he put all the 120,000 yuan he had saved over three years to buy a car into Bitcoin. Back then, the price was around 18,000 each. He had calculated countless times: if it went up to 50,000, he could buy a car; if it reached 100,000, he’d have enough for a down payment.

Who knew that two years later it would shoot straight up to 4 million.

He’s tasted Romanée-Conti at that Bund restaurant. At the time, he really felt like he was the chosen one—the market’s favorite, the lucky one of the era. That bottle of wine is still there, but he’s already moved from living alone in an apartment to a shared bedroom with two others.

In the winter of 2018, the coin price crashed from 120,000 yuan to below 30,000, and his account was left with less than 300,000. He said during that time, he didn’t even dare to look too long at the pancake stall downstairs.

Later, he summed up a few rules—lessons truly bought with money.

**Rule one: Don’t touch what you don’t understand.**

He chased so-called “mining coins” and lost 500,000 in one night. Only afterward did he find out that the project’s basic code was copied, and the technical documentation was all copy-pasted. Now he reviews audit reports for anything he invests in, no matter if it’s recommended by a friend.

**Rule two: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.**

Now he splits his money into four parts: half in mainstream assets like $BTC and $ETH , 20% in infrastructure like cross-chain protocols, 20% in grid trading arbitrage, and the last 10% for high-risk projects. When the market was cut in half last year, his account only drew down by 8%.

**Rule three: Stay away from leverage.**

On March 12, 2020, his 20x leverage contract was liquidated, and 800,000 evaporated in an instant. The next day, he uninstalled all trading apps and hasn’t touched contracts since. He says leverage is like smoking; if you can’t quit, it’ll ruin your life.

**Rule four: Filtering information is more important than finding information.**

A week before the LUNA crash in 2022, he noticed abnormal on-chain staking rates and sold out early. But before that, he’d also blindly followed “big shots” calling trades—those shitcoins’ charts are nowhere to be found now.

The riskiest moment was when an exchange had issues in 2021. The platform was still promoting high-yield financial products, but he spotted anomalies from cold wallet records and transferred his assets out before withdrawals were frozen. Many people still haven’t gotten their principal back.

Now Old Zhang doesn’t chase hundredfold coins anymore. He relies on DeFi staking and cyclical rotation to steadily maintain an annualized yield of about 15%. Last year, he opened a guesthouse in Yunnan—managing the place by day, watching on-chain data at night.

“There’s no such thing as a miracle in crypto,” he said, half a bottle in, pointing at the snow-capped mountains outside the window. “Those who survive are the lucky ones. Real money comes from weathering time.”

$BNB or $ETH , ups and downs are the norm. Only those who stay at the table are qualified for the next round.