Cherish IQ and stay away from “blockchain”

The Chinese people have always practiced a variety of conflicting values, and how to choose which value they want to believe at the right time has become an important ability for our people to control their lives.

For example, hating chemical processing and believing in natural creation are one of the simplest views of right and wrong among Chinese people. To this day, Guo Degang still uses the voice of Yu Qian's wife in cross talk to educate the audience, "Western medicine is harmful to the body, I'll give you some Chinese medicine." The audience nodded frequently after hearing this. Ye Maozhong, a marketing master in northern Jiangsu who knows our country's consumers best, also customized the famous advertising slogan "We hate chemistry" for a skin care product based on this point.

However, what is interesting is that the deep-seated hatred of chemistry has not affected the Chinese people's enthusiastic embrace of new vocabulary in the fields of physics and information technology. For example, from "magnetic therapy", "infrared" and "resonance" in the 1990s to "nano" and "quantum" later, any research progress or academic hot spot in the physics world will definitely be transformed into a health magic weapon by the Chinese people.

The same thing also occurs in the field of information technology. Any popular Internet concept will inevitably provide a large number of scammers with opportunities to make money. From "Chinese domain names", "WeChat marketing", "P2P financial management", "O2O entrepreneurship" to "MMM" and "Solomon Matrix", with the Chinese people's belief in "mysterious technical terms must be opportunities to make money", the business of cutting leeks is getting easier and easier.

The latest scam is the hot concept right now - "blockchain".

I have a little boss friend

Among the many anxiety syndromes, the "middle class" and "baby mothers" at least have social media to vent, while the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises spread over the vast country have nowhere to put their anxieties about performance growth, team building, market judgment and knowledge updating.

Small and medium-sized enterprises rely to a large extent on the boss's own ability to survive. Small bosses in the real economy in third- and fourth-tier areas who are well aware of this always feel that there is a lack of potential and hope in the Internet era. The information asymmetry gap projected from the north to the deep has deepened this anxiety.

It just so happens that these anxious people have enough paying ability, so it is completely predictable what role they will play in the market.

I have such a little boss friend. Over the past ten years, I have watched him go from singing the national anthem with his tutor Jucheng, to entering Huashang College and meeting a bunch of "students", to forwarding Su Yinhua's (a disciple of Chen Anzhi)'s classic quotations every day, to participating in Shengjing Network's "Food Fund Crowdfunding"... The incense money handed over by these small bosses of Volkswagen has supported hundreds of tutors with middle school education in our country to drive Bentleys.

Regarding the fact that he was deceived, I was already numb and too lazy to say anything. Until last week, he sent me a link and asked me to take a look. I was immediately shocked when I saw words such as "Li Xiaolai" and "Blockchain Investment" written in the link——

Times have progressed after all, and these people who have read some books can finally come out and fool the small bosses.

(Screenshot of Xue Manzi’s Weibo, Xue has invested in “blockchain”)

"Let's start a blockchain project and get a steady 30% profit a month"

How to fool the small boss efficiently? A simple way to investigate is to quit gambling on Baidu. Under a post titled "What can I do to make money? I have 130,000 yuan now, what can I do to make 1,000 a day?", an old man replied like this, "Let's work on a blockchain project and get a steady 30% income a month."

30% yield, this is the true understanding of "blockchain" in the public. The Guizhou Big Data Center and the national AI strategy are too far away, and the original meaning of "blockchain" is even less known (for example, I still don't understand what this word means, but it does not affect me writing this article, nor does it affect your reading).

Correspondingly, the original philosophical concepts and political metaphors of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and the cryptopunks have been completely accepted by smart people in our country——

"The state will inevitably try to slow down or prevent the spread of encryption technology. However, this does not prevent the anarchic spread of encryption technology."

This is the theoretical basis for "blockchain" to become a means of huge profits: an "underground stock market" that can escape government control. This is how the game is played:

First, find some programmers. Don’t be too expensive, a monthly salary of 3K is enough, Beida Jade Bird’s is the best. Let them go to places like GitHub to pick up some code and modify it, such as the development method of "Quantum Chain"——

(The modification can be completed in 15 days, and the code farmers can be paid 1.5K salary)

There you have it, you have a working “blockchain” project. The actual significance of this project doesn’t matter. You can make up one at will: improving medical efficiency, accelerating financial reform, and promoting scientific and technological development. Here we refer to Teacher Li Xiaolai’s PressOne project. This “blockchain” project claims to “subvert the centralized content distribution model”——

(Shudder, all the trash who still dare to provide free content)

Then next, you only need to write a white paper pdf file that does not seem to have too many typos, hang it on the Internet, announce the crowdfunding with gongs and drums, and wait for the leeks to pay.

Some people may ask, aren’t these projects obviously nonsense? Why would Leeks invest?

Have you ever heard of "innovation"? Yes, it’s the legendary “new” in A-shares, and every investor will be delighted when they hit it.

Due to the IPO policy of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the issuance of new shares is strictly controlled, so that the new projects that investors can invest in are extremely limited, and the prices of these limited projects are restricted (the price-to-earnings ratio is locked). Therefore, almost every new stock is released to the daily limit for dozens of times in a row. You can make money by buying new stocks. You don’t need to use brain cells. Just buy them.

So, when my little boss friend was invited to participate in the "Coin God Training Camp", the fellow little bosses all expressed that they did not understand what Bitcoin, blockchain, and ICO were at all. At this time, the instructor pointed out: "Just think of it as 'creating new ideas.'" The little bosses immediately looked like they were suddenly enlightened.

That's right, the real routine of the so-called "blockchain" project is that the project issues "leek coins" to the outside world, and the leeks use Bitcoin (or RMB) to purchase the leek coins at a ratio. The characteristics of leek coins are that the cost is zero and the total amount is limited. The later you buy it, the more expensive it becomes, and it becomes rarer and harder to buy. The project side hinted that if the "new strategy" is successful, Leek will be able to wait for the Leek currency to appreciate in one word: stable.

You might guess: With such an old-fashioned trick, you can defraud hundreds of thousands at a time, or millions, right?

Sorry, this is the fundraising goal of the PressOne project that Mr. Li Xiaolai didn’t even bother to write a white paper. Please read it——

200 million US dollars, thank you.

In order to make it easier for everyone to understand the concept of Leech Wheel’s US$200 million, let’s list a few figures: Momo’s Series F is US$60 million, Smartisan’s Series B is US$200 million, Didi’s Series E is US$142 million, and Mobike’s Series D is US$200 million. No wonder, in a recent training course, Li Xiaolai said that "PressOne is a project that breaks the old world, and Li Xiaolai is a rare person who can do this."

By the way, the "Quantum Chain" project above was also supported by teacher Li Xiaolai's platform and has successfully crowdfunded nearly 22 million yuan.

There is someone bigger than Li Xiaolai

Unfortunately, my friend, a young business owner, has been a bit murmuring about "blockchain" investment because he has been deceived too many times before. Soon after, the instructors who asked him to train him used a new routine, and this time it completely hit the weak spot in the little boss's heart.

(The advertisement sent to me by a small boss is a "Blockchain President Class" organized by a training institution under the name of Beijing Postal University. The tuition fee is 12,800 yuan)

To put it simply, this routine is no longer to let the small bosses spend money to invest in leek coins, but to build a leek coin trading platform and let the small bosses issue their own coins. After the public buys the leek coins of these small bosses, they can trade on the leek coin trading platform.

The instructors euphemistically called it "using blockchain accounting technology to build the company into a truly public company." Translated, this sentence means, "You small businesses all lack financing channels. A-share IPOs are impossible. Listing on the New OTC Market is boring. You dare not engage in private fundraising. Bank lending costs are high. However, if you sell high-tech packaged 'blockchain' leek coins to the public and raise funds from the public in the name of 'Internet investment,' you can reduce a lot of resistance and fool people who are stupider than you." You can imagine how strong the motivation of small bosses to participate is.

It is not difficult to imagine that the target audience of this product will go far beyond the "blockchain" project mentioned above, and will directly reach middle-aged and elderly people in third- and fourth-tier areas. They used to be precise customers of various private fund-raising and financial management scams. Now they are watching the company of relatives and friends selling "Internet digital currency". "Blockchain" sounds like a new thing that will set off a technological revolution. Can you not invest in it?

To sum up, most of the "digital currencies", "blockchain projects" and "ICO crowdfunding" on the market are speculative games under the guise of "blockchain". They are completely underground news markets without any regulatory guarantees and are extremely risky.