# A Story from the Liang Shan Group Chat—

Crypto Dust: From Basement to Hundred Million Holdings

My name is Chen Mo, and that winter in 2020 was the darkest night of my life.

My rental was in a basement in an urban village, never seeing sunlight year-round. Damp wallpaper peeled off in strips, leftover takeout boxes piled in the corners, and the air reeked of mold and ramen grease. I curled up on a squeaky wooden bed, staring at the glaring red numbers on my phone screen, fingers numb with cold.

Two hundred thirty thousand yuan in debt.

Credit cards, online loans, borrowed money from friends—like nets woven so tightly I couldn't escape. Debt collection calls rang from morning to night. I didn't dare answer, just muted my phone and watched the screen light up and fade in the darkness again and again. Two years after graduation, I'd gone from an idealistic small-town youth to a deadbeat who couldn't even afford rent.

That day the landlord pounded on the door cursing, saying he'd throw my stuff out if I didn't pay. I clutched the only seven hundred twenty yuan left in my pocket, too ashamed to even speak. After he left, I buried my head in my knees. For the first time, I felt how impossibly hard it was just to be alive.

It wasn't that I hadn't tried. I worked factory shifts screwing in bolts, delivered food, drove for ride-sharing services, slept four or five hours a day. But my earnings couldn't even cover the interest. I watched people around me buy cars and houses while I hesitated for half a day over a ten-yuan fast meal.

In my despair, I scrolled past a video about Bitcoin.

On screen, someone with just tens of thousands as seed capital turned it into tens of times returns in a bull market and achieved financial freedom. In that instant, like a beam of light piercing my gray life, I found hope. I knew it was gambling, dancing on a knife's edge, but I had nowhere left to go. Those seven hundred twenty yuan were my last chips, my only lifeline.

I gritted my teeth and dumped all the money into an exchange. Bitcoin was in a low consolidation phase then. I didn't understand candlesticks, moving averages, support and resistance levels—just pure desperation. I went all-in on a small altcoin.

Day one, it went up five points. I was ecstatic, thinking fortune was at hand.

Day two, it dropped ten points. My palms sweated and I couldn't sleep all night.

Day three, it crashed thirty points straight. My account was nearly wiped out.

I collapsed on the floor, staring at the sea of red losses, tears finally streaming down my face. Even my last shred of hope had been crushed by the market. I thought about giving up, thought about ending it all, but remembering my parents back home breaking their backs in the fields, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I couldn't lose.

From that day on, I locked myself in the basement, gave up all entertainment, slept only three hours a day. When hungry, I ate instant ramen; when thirsty, I drank tap water. I savagely devoured crypto knowledge. Candlestick charts, whitepapers, exchange rules, whale manipulation tactics—I wrote notes on scraps of paper and plastered them all over the walls, dense and suffocating, like a silent battle.

I deleted all games, canceled all pointless socializing. My eyes saw only red and green intertwined K-lines. What others saw as madness was my desperation to survive.

Three months later, I finally grasped some patterns in the market. I stopped blind all-ins and learned to probe with small positions, learned stop-losses and take-profits, learned to resist panic during crashes and stay calm during surges. With two thousand yuan scraped together through frugal living, I re-entered the market.

This time, I got the trend right.

The 2021 bull market arrived. Bitcoin soared relentlessly, altcoins exploded in turns. With two thousand yuan, I precisely caught several waves of hot trends, and my account snowballed. Two thousand became twenty thousand, twenty thousand became two hundred thousand, two hundred thousand became two million...

Every profit, I kept my head clear. I remembered the despair of liquidation, remembered the basement's cold, remembered the piercing sound of debt collector calls. I strictly adhered to my trading discipline, avoiding high leverage, not chasing meme coins, taking profits and locking in gains.

The day my account broke through ten million yuan, I walked out of the basement.

The sunlight was blinding. I squinted, looking at the bustling world outside, feeling like I'd lived a lifetime. I immediately paid off all my debts, sent money to my parents so they wouldn't have to struggle anymore. Over the phone, my mother's voice trembled as she said I'd grown up. Fighting back tears, I said, "Mom, I'm okay now."

Later, I bought a house downtown, got a car, and never had to worry about money again. Standing at my floor-to-ceiling window, watching the city lights gleam below, I still remember eating instant ramen in that basement. The memory still haunts me.

Some say I was just lucky, caught the bull market. But only I know the truth—those days and nights of obsessive study, the agony of watching price swings, the desperation of all-in commitment—none of that was luck.

Crypto is a purgatory and a dream factory. Some get rich overnight here, others lose everything. I've seen too many people consumed by greed, adding leverage, chasing pumps and selling dips, eventually losing it all.

But I've never forgotten where I started.

Today I still work deep in crypto, but without the recklessness of before. I do value investing, long-term positioning, risk management as my priority. I know the market never lacks opportunities—what it lacks is the patience to protect profits and the reverence for the market.

From two hundred thousand yuan in debt to a hundred million in net worth, it took me one year.

That year, I walked through hell and saw heaven.

Crypto never lacks legends. What it lacks is people who hold true to their heart. And I simply grasped a beam of light in my darkest hour, then fought with everything I had to become my own sun.