Late-night volatility, in the crypto world, we are all prophets and gamblers of our own making

Dusk always begins with refreshing the trading pair list. As city lights start to glow, the candlestick charts on the screen undergo another silent tide. Red and green numbers cascade like a waterfall, reflecting countless bloodshot eyes. Someone lights their seventh cigarette tonight, ashtray filled with the remnants of last night’s riches; someone trembles as they press “Buy All,” as if rebooting their fate. Here, the sun never sets, because somewhere in a time zone, the dawn of digital currency is breaking — or the abyss.

I remember that old man, always in the corner of the late-night shared workspace, tapping away at a worn keyboard. He said he used to be a mathematics professor, now decoding a more mysterious language: blockchain whitepapers, tokenomics models, the poetic algorithms of consensus. His whiteboard is filled with Fibonacci sequences and Elliott wave theory, yet next to it is a photo of a little girl. “For her,” he once drunkenly said, “I will mine the next BTC.” Last spring, he disappeared, leaving only a note: “Consensus is truth.” Later, I heard he bought an island with crypto in a small country, and some say he finally fell in a leveraged liquidation. In the crypto world, everyone lives as a legend or a cautionary tale, with no middle ground.

When the bull market arrives, the entire universe resonates. Taxi drivers recommend altcoins, strangers in the gym show NFT art, family group chats start circulating “how to register on exchanges” screenshots. Wealth stories spread virally on social media: college students pay tuition with MEME coins, delivery workers flip contracts to buy mansions, retired teachers fund world tours through early staking. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) spreads like wildfire, burning down rational defenses. You watch your account balance jump hourly, spinning a dizzying illusion beyond physical laws — wealth can be so light, so weightless that it makes gravity seem irrelevant.

Until the “Black Swan” appears.

It might be a regulatory rumor, an exchange outage, a tweet from an opinion leader, or even just a technical correction. But when panic sets in, everyone repeats the same phrase: “This time is different.” The waterfall crash drains the room of oxygen, liquidation messages arrive more punctually than death itself. The community plunges from celebration into silence, leaving only the ruthless records of liquidation bots. Someone posts a screenshot of a zeroed-out account with the caption “Start over”; someone quietly leaves the group, disappearing into the digital ocean; a rare few begin to buy the dip, picking up blood-stained chips from the river of blood. An OG who has experienced three cycles of bull and bear says, “In crypto, there’s no new thing — only new blood.”

Deeper revolutions happen in silence. The developers truly changing the world often stay calm in the most fervent or desperate moments. They debate the elegance of zero-knowledge proofs, test the boundaries of sharding, simulate the future financial skeleton on testnets. I once infiltrated a project’s Discord developer channel, at 3 a.m., where anonymous avatars from six continents debugged a smart contract code. No borders, no skin colors, only a shared belief in “verifiable fairness.” A German high schooler solved a cross-chain problem that had troubled the team for weeks, earning 500 governance tokens — worth a coffee at the time, enough two years later to buy the local library. This is the ultimate romanticism of technological idealism: creating trust with mathematics, rebuilding the Tower of Babel with code.

But the crypto world always bears the face of the two-faced god. The same technology can preserve assets amid chaos, or pave the way for dark web transactions; empower creators to earn directly, or spawn the most glamorous gambling dens in history. We mock traditional finance’s bloatedness, yet copy all its greed; we yearn for a decentralized utopia, yet often kneel before new idols. In this torn world, perhaps the greatest consensus is: we are all participating in a grand social experiment, with the experiment’s subjects being wealth, human nature, and the future itself.

Today, the corner where the old man sat has new occupants. A 20-year-old DeFi farmer, providing liquidity across thirty chains, whose universe is composed of annualized yields and impermanent loss formulas. When asked why he’s here, he thought for a moment: “In the old world, it takes generations to cross the class divide. Here, you only need one correct insight, and the courage to stay until dawn.” The screen’s glow illuminates his young face, and also illuminates humanity’s unchanging longing: for freedom, for wealth, and for the eternal gamble of “maybe this time, I’ll be different.”

Late at night, Bitcoin once again breaks previous highs or falls below support. Countless phone screens light up simultaneously, like stars scattered across the Earth. Behind each flickering point of light is a real life: someone pledged their wedding ring, someone saved their first Bitcoin for their child, someone wants to prove they saw the future right, and someone just doesn’t want to miss the most exciting story of this era.

And we are all characters in this story — prophets and gamblers alike; believers and skeptics; intertwined in the fog of code and humanity, betting on a tomorrow yet to be written.
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