In July 2018, “the 500-million guy” made his move.

At the time, with BTC hovering around 6,000, the market also felt the bottoming had been successful and was waiting for a new round of rebounds. Someone kept going long on OK’s quarterly and weekly contracts (back then, the top ten large position holders for each contract coin could be found via exchange data).

Bitcoin has rebounded sharply: from mid-July to July 24, Bitcoin rose from 6,000 to 8,400, a gain of about 40% in roughly one week.

Once again, you hear talk of “the bulls are here!” But most eyes are focused on the top position holder in futures trading: he opened over 4 million contracts on quarterly futures alone. Each contract is worth $100, meaning his position totals more than $400 million. Meanwhile, OK’s total open interest is only about 8 to 10 million contracts. At the peak, he alone accounted for half of the exchange’s open interest.

Back then, the BTC size really wasn’t that big. Everyone generally guessed he was an exchange operator, or someone with big funds—following him couldn’t be wrong. He kept opening longs during the Bitcoin rise on the last day too. In the end, Bitcoin barely corrected and broke below 7800, and then he was liquidated. At that time, the liquidated positions shown in real-time on the order book were yellow; you could clearly see there were 4 million lots of orders sitting on the 7800 BTC level. Unfortunately, I was focused on EOS and didn’t immediately short BTC (also because EOS scared me; my internal conspiracy theories carried some weight—I was afraid it would get absorbed and then rebound immediately). According to OK’s later official tone: he continuously had unrealized profit and added positions, then he used the Friday 4 o’clock weekly settlement to withdraw the unrealized gains, leaving only funds maintaining 20x leverage.

This led to several outcomes: during the weekly Friday settlement of BTC, there was a massive amount of positions being liquidated, and all profitable traders had to cover 18% of the liquidation fee.

OK, the official side also put out 1,500 to 2,500 BTC to cover the losses.

In subsequent measures, rules were added for early liquidation, and the remaining funds after early liquidation were used as contract margin.

Ten days later, Bitcoin dropped from over 8000 back to the starting point of the rise, as if nothing had happened.

And for EOS, it fell from $9 to $4. When it broke below $5, I really didn’t dare to buy the dip. Even though the quarterly negative funding premium had reached around -10%. If you only open 1x leverage, because it’s coin-margined, there’s still a possibility of liquidation.

To open a position, you first have to buy coins—if you don’t have coins, you can’t open. They’re all coin-margined contracts: the coins you earn from weekly profits can’t be sold; you can only sell after the Friday afternoon 4 o’clock settlement. This means that when you have no position, you need to open a hedge, worrying that it might drop again. Maybe it’s similar to how I like opening hedges now.

Someone always says I like to short, and afterwards there’s usually a whole long string of analysis. If you’ve read the earlier articles, you’ve also seen that.

And I wasn’t someone who liked shorting from the very beginning.

I’ve also walked the path from trying to top-tick at highs and buying the dip during declines. In 2018, crypto dip-buyers were treated the harshest “fathers”—there’s no minimum, only lower: back then, the ICO project teams collectively dumped. This one sold 200,000, that one sold 300,000; for EOS, the project team sold hundreds of millions of tokens.

This is also the culprit for ETH later falling from $600 to $180. The project teams really don’t behave like humans.

A single delivery/settlement order reshaped my entire trading system.

What truly made me坚定ly commit to trend trading was not the so-called big shots’ courses, and not countless rounds of profit/loss review. It was actually one EOS profit chart.

Back then in crypto, having a few million or even a few tens of millions was top-tier for retail traders.

I saw someone’s profit chart for going long on EOS from $4.5 to $6.8—he made profit in the tens of thousands of EOS, and one trade earned several million. In that era, for retail traders to make millions from a single trade was truly top-tier, no exaggeration.

That’s the moment when it really clicked: real big money in trading is never about frequent operations—it’s the ultimate harvesting of an entire trend moving in the right direction.

I was really tempted, so I jumped into real trading immediately and started trying to short EOS by topping out around $6.8.

At the beginning, it wasn’t smooth either: although it soon saw a drop, its rebound speed was also very fast.

The real test was only just beginning.

There wasn’t a one-shot, spectacular crash—only repeated, unpredictable, violent rebounds. Every pullback tested my mindset. In the constant tug-of-war of emotions and internal friction, I only got 100% to 200% profit. Holding the position, enduring drawdowns—that really is the hardest part of trend trading, isn’t it?

Maybe the core of trend trading: opening a position is just the entry ticket; surviving while holding through the ordeal is the required course for高手. Endure drawdowns, hold up against chaos, and fight greed and fear—these are the kinds of obstacles many people, for many years, just can’t get past.

Later it dropped back to around $5 to build a base; anyway, I was low-long, high-short, and kept fighting with it.

Time moved to November, and inside BCC they started tearing each other apart again. Back then there were Craig Wright and Wu Jihan; it split into two camps.

One camp wanted bigger blocks, one camp wanted to keep 32M, and another wanted 128M.

A fierce dispute over blockchain ideology erupted

Anyway, back then both of their BTC holdings were huge. The Craig Wright camp was the first to dump the market, and BCH instantly plunged from over 600 to around 500. Because futures at the time had a negative funding premium limit, it could only stay around -25%, with futures still at over 400. Similar to the previous BTC split, Craig Wright wanted to fork BCH: holding one BCH would result in receiving one BCH plus one BSV. Everyone was buying BCH spot to hold for the fork reward, then they would open a short position of the same value in BCH futures. But I thought, after such a huge instant drop, shouldn’t it go back up a bit? So I opened longs around 440–450 in the futures market.

But I quickly found a problem: there was no buy-side demand. The futures price kept pushing down at a -25% futures premium, and it didn’t stabilize until it fell to just over 400.

It wasn’t really that it stabilized—spot just couldn’t drop any further, and futures never had any buy-side.

If you want to stop out, you can only place an order—set it at the price of the sell one (best ask). Then you still have to see if there are other people who want to buy the dip to save me.

In the end I lost about 10,000 to 20,000, so I cut the loss. Luckily it turned out that way, because the day of the fork started a brutal crash.

By December, it was down to just a few dozen dollars.

Although I got into the EOS short position very early—shorted at $5.2—I ran away at $4. Because that was the previous August bottom, and I even started trying to long; when it broke below $4, I flipped and continued shorting. In the end, I only made a small portion of the money.

It’s far less than just holding a position and earning profits.

By then I had already started trying trend trading. But like most traders, I always got in too early. When the trend started, I also too early gave up the positions (the chips) in my hands. In the early stage of a decline, the market usually falls slowly and rebounds violently, but often the last few days are when profit is the richest. I didn’t hold onto my chips; I handed them over too early. And that’s also what led me to learn many lessons later: hold onto profitable positions until the trend is completely over.

It was also one real-life lesson after another, burned into my trading; patience is the key, perseverance wins, hold onto profits, block out emotional noise—until the trend is fully over, that’s the top-level mindset in trading, right?