Who hasn’t fantasized about making money while lying down? But reality taught me a harsh lesson: however magical the wealth creation in crypto seems, the crashes are just as outrageous.

During that market surge in the summer of 2019, it was as if Lady Luck had completely bewitched me—my ETH account rocketed from 300,000 to 3.89 million in just 58 days, with candlesticks steep enough to be a diving board. I was totally manic back then—watching price charts even while picking up food with chopsticks, shouting “Longs, charge!” in my sleep, and even feeling like I was sneezing out money. I was posting screenshots in my Moments every day: “Making money? Easier than breathing.” Looking back now, it’s embarrassing. That wasn’t skill at all; it was pure luck feeding me sugar-coated bombs.

In less than three months, the market slapped me awake. Mainstream coins crashed in an avalanche, my leveraged long got liquidated, and my principal of over 3.4 million was reduced to just 50,000—even the closing fees nearly weren’t covered. I stared blankly at the liquidation notice for over half an hour, my mind buzzing: turns out, luck is the most unreliable thing of all.

After years in crypto, I’ve seen too many people mistake dumb luck for skill. In 2021, a friend mortgaged his house and went all-in on altcoins, got an 8x return, but got greedy and refused to exit—ended up getting liquidated and lost even his place to live. Others chant about their “diamond hands” faith, treating holding as dogma during bull markets, only for it to become self-delusion and bag-holding in the bear. Truth is, all that “long-term conviction” you hear in a bull market is mostly just losers making excuses for themselves. The ones who actually survive three cycles aren’t relying on magic predictions—they’ve built risk control into their DNA.

After getting liquidated, I quit gambling for good and set three hard rules for myself. It was these rules that helped me claw my way back from that 50,000 mess—but that’s a story for another time. The lessons I learned from losing money are more useful than any signal from a KOL.