Old Gao, born in the late 1960s of the 20th century, is an atypical middle-aged man in the county. The reason for this description is that he was once one of the ‘top performers’.

　　This is the consensus of many people around him. This consensus comes from his ‘half-life achievements’ – as a businessman, he not only witnessed but also experienced the reform and opening up, the restructuring of state-owned factories, the real estate investment boom, and the subsequent transformation of Zhejiang’s private capital into legal financial capital. He has seen the curve of the times go up all the way, and has always been looking for opportunities in the times to gain some returns.

　　When he was in his early 20s, he was a mechanic in a local textile factory, relying on his welding skills, he resigned proactively before the factory reform and the wave of layoffs. Later, he relied on the mushroom industry in the county, transforming a small workshop into one of the most famous brands in the county – in the early years of the new millennium, the auxiliary materials sold in Old Gao’s store accounted for more than a third of the county’s sales.

　　He also opened the first micro-loan company in the county, and until 2018, his company was the largest loan institution in terms of loan amount in the county.

　　Old Gao accumulated his first fortune through hard work and information advantage, and with these funds, he continued to accumulate his wealth for the next 20 plus years. He has invested in small hydropower in Guizhou, real estate, and has also doubled his wealth through property. He firmly believes in progress and development, and also believes that hard work can bring corresponding rewards.

　　Originally, a stable and prosperous life could continue steadily. However, some things have changed.

　　Tracing back, the clues of change began in 2015. That year, in this county in the southwest of Zhejiang, some people started to spread the idea of ‘making money by trading coins’, and a surge of the cryptocurrency craze was about to happen.

　　Satoshi Nakamoto, who published ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ in 2008, might have foreseen the penetration of blockchain technology into real life today, but he might not have imagined that its derivatives would have such a huge impact on the lives of middle-aged and elderly men in this county in Zhejiang.

　　In 2017, when the price of Bitcoin surged wildly, which was the third year after the emergence of the ‘bitcoin fever’ spreaders in the county, according to incomplete statistics, at least thousands of people in the city (the majority being middle-aged and elderly men) held a currency called ‘RadarCoin’. Compared to the total population of the county, which is only about a hundred thousand, these thousands of middle-aged and elderly men represented a significant number.

　　In the publicly available information, RadarCoin claims to be a lottery and How to find it based on blockchain technology. This self-proclaimed ‘the third largest currency after Bitcoin and Ethereum’ has not listed on mainstream exchanges, but trades on its own exchange ‘Radar Payment’. Before the Online casino and How to find it trading was listed as an illegal activity by the Chinese government, RadarCoin was already judged by many as a ‘scam coin’ or ‘pyramid scheme coin’ due to its ‘award promotion, interest on holding coins’ model.online and The latest entrance

　　It is hard to imagine how the concept of blockchain and online casino and How to find it, a concept popular among investors and the internet circle, has渗透 into a small county in East China.

　　Understand this county with the simplest business常识: it has not yet been favored by KFC and McDonald’s, nor does it have Starbucks. The city only has the ‘downward King’ brands that have emerged in the past two years, such as Luckin Coffee, a little bit, Xi Jie fried skewers, Mixue Bingcheng, and its coffee brand, Luck Coffee.

　　And these middle-aged and elderly men in the下沉 market, the places they have been to in their lives are not too far from where they were born. The way they obtain external information is often limited to WeChat official accounts, Toutiao, and Douyin. The only common point they have with city coin players may be that they are all eager for wealth and fantasize that they are the main characters of miracles.

　　But now, it is not very likely to climb to a higher level of wealth through houses – major cities have successively introduced purchase restrictions before and after 2010. Buying houses in Lao Gao’s eyes has become a ‘path dependence’, compared to the Radar Coin, it has already ‘become outdated’.

　　But it turned out that he could not make money beyond his own cognition. Lao Gao bet on a scam built on lies and greed, a series of virtual numbers that made him deviate from his understanding of wealth. He believed that he was only one step away from becoming a billionaire.

　　But now, this dream has been shattered, and his life has turned in a different direction.

　　As a middle-aged man in the county, Lao Gao’s pursuit in life used to be that after his child returned from studying abroad, he could find a stable and good job. He himself could buy a house in the city and own a decent car.

　　These wishes, Lao Gao had realized before he turned 50.

　　Life in the county is plain and boring. Lao Gao’s daily life is even simpler. He doesn’t drink heavily, doesn’t play Mahjong, and has no other ‘bad habits’ except for smoking. He has only a few close friends.

　　On one day when Lao Gao was 50 years old in 2017, he suddenly started to have more dinner parties and made many more ‘friends’.

　　They gather at the county hotel, small restaurants, or nearby rural inns. The topics of discussion are simple, starting from the daily rise and fall of the Radar Coin and extending to new coin types that may bring greater wealth (of course, they are also air coins). The news that friend A cashed out and bought a Land Rover and a Mercedes-Benz, and friend B bought a house in Hangzhou, a city in the province, would always push the atmosphere of the dinner party to a climax.

　　City coin players love to gather in the Web 3.0 cafes in Beijing or Dali, sipping coffee or Perrier, and talking about ‘metaverse’ and ‘NFT’ all the time. These men from the county are neither geeks nor investors, but mostly small business people.

　　Like all circles, those who can play together must be evenly matched. There are thousands of people playing coins in the whole county, but Lao Gao is only active in a small group of 20 people. The group members are relatively large players in the county who hold a significant amount of coins, ranging from tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand.

　　Lao Gao is one of the earlier players to get involved. When the Radar Coin was as low as 30 yuan in 2017, he bought tens of thousands of them. In the following years, as the price rose, he also

　　In early 2020, when major investors大量 bought and hoarded RadarCoin, and released the news that RadarCoin would be listed on a third-party exchange – this made Lao Gao and other ‘retail’ investors believe that RadarCoin would no longer be a ‘pyramid scheme’. The price of RadarCoin also rose from around 140 yuan at the beginning of the year to about 500 yuan by the middle of the year.

　　In less than half a year, the coin price doubled nearly twice. If calculated based on the highest value of RadarCoin at 538 yuan in 2020, there were at least 50 million yuan in RMB in Lao Gao’s exchange wallet. The ‘investment masters’ in the several large cryptocurrency groups he was in kept pushing the market, predicting that RadarCoin would exceed 1,000 yuan by the end of 2020.

　　The speed of wealth expansion was so rapid that news spread even faster. Players in the county town called their relatives and friends, continuously injecting fresh blood into the RadarCoin investment pool. Many people even didn’t buy or sell, but asked Lao Gao to help them. The funds he handled reached several tens of millions at most on some days.

　　Thus, the concept of ‘Online casino and How to find it,’ popular among urban elites, quickly took root and spread in a county-level city through family and friend relationships.

　　For most of 2020, Lao Gao’s wife accompanied their child in school in Hangzhou. During her absence, he lived like a bachelor. He enjoyed daily banquets with his cryptocurrency friends, toasting and smoking, eating to his heart’s content, and immersed in excitement every day.

　　In 2014, a self-proclaimed ‘version 2.0 of Bitcoin’ called ‘Vbao’ emerged. After one month of issuance, its price skyrocketed from 331 yuan to 997 yuan. According to a report by ‘Prism’ in 2014, Vbao attracted hundreds of thousands of players from the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, who were willing to take on debt to buy it.

　　However, this token, which once claimed to ‘replace the US dollar and become a global currency,’ collapsed in just one year. It then transformed into the RadarCoin we see today.

　　At that time, RadarCoin promoted itself on its official website as follows:

　　RadarCoin (VBC) was developed by Radar Lab with the support of venture capital firms such as IDG Capital and Google Ventures in 2012. It was developed over two and a half years and successfully launched on July 5, 2014. The source code and white paper were publicly released on http://github.com on October 25 of the same year, with top economists and scientists from around the world involved in the research and development.

　　However, no information about RadarCoin can be found on the official websites of IDG Capital or Google Ventures.

　　Similar to its predecessor Vbao, RadarCoin not only concocts false news to secure endorsements from credible institutions, but also relies on lecturer training programs, conferences, annual meetings, and seminars organized in various regions to create a stir. Most crucially, the distribution mechanism of Vbao and RadarCoin’s upline and downline structure has convinced legal experts that they are pyramid schemes disguised as online casinos and how to find them.

　　Although there were many netizens who had deeply investigated the pyramid scheme nature of radar coin on forums like Tianya and Zhihu at that time, these posts were either deleted or attracted a storm of骂声 in the comment sections.

　　People who have the ability to distinguish between internet information might be able to identify whether these titles are intimidating and whether the facts are fabricated through searchingsports betting method and Latest Address. But people like Old Gao believed it without a doubt.

　　During the time when Old Gao was most enthusiastic about radar coin, he was keen to open a video of a woman’s speech at the ‘International Conference’—although she stood on a simple stage, and her language was identical to what investment masters said in WeChat groups, ‘I’ve told you before that radar coin will definitely rise! Hurry up and throw away your pots and pans, it’s not too late to enter the market now.’

　　Coin friends respectfully called her ‘A Hui Teacher’, and it was said that she had earned several billion yuan from radar coin. In 2020, ‘Qingdao Illustration’ issue 7 did a 6-page interview with A Hui. The title was written like this: ‘Chasing the Trend of the Times, Boldly Be the ‘Pioneer of the Road’—Interview with the Founder of F7 Radar Enterprise Alliance, Wang Shuhui (A Hui).’

　　Old Gao once regarded her as a guide, placing this magazine in the office. He believed in the authority of local newspapers and magazines, which made A Hui’s speaking tours across the country unchallengeable.

　　His junior high school education was not enough to let Old Gao understand what ‘blockchain’, ‘decentralization’, and ‘metaverse’ really were, let alone summarize or repeat their concepts. However, these keywords had a great magic power for him. As long as they appeared in the Today’s Headlines, Douyin, or the links thrown by ‘investment masters’, he would definitely click on them—he was surrounded by an information silo constructed by coin circle players.

　　In fact, people like Old Gao didn’t care about those mystical and abstract terms and concepts.

　　He was obsessed with this money-making mechanism. Radar coin claimed that coin holders could receive an additional 3%-5% of mining income per month, which means that wealth was increasing every day. With tens of thousands of coins in his hand, he could produce about 20 coins a day, which was equivalent to him earning more than 10,000 yuan a day by simply lying down.

　　For those one or two years, the radar coin indeed allowed Old Gao’s family to live a better life. When they needed money, they sold a few coins here and there.

　　A person suddenly had the wealth that he had never dared to dream of in the past—a string of numbers followed by ‘0’s that can only be counted by scratching one’s fingers, and can be converted into real wealth. Old Gao was so happy that he was confused.

　　The newly wealthy people in the county town regretted the missed opportunities in the past and followed with house sales or loans. Old Gao only hoped to achieve his new goal and put his idle money into a channel that could make money faster. Especially when big cities introduced purchase restriction policies, and small loan businesses also began to frequently appear bad debts, except for the radar coin as a way to make money, his choices were few.

　　He also tried to put his eggs in more than one basket. He invested 160,000 yuan into a ‘fake platform,’ and the other party ran away after a week. However, to old Gao at that time, these money were just ‘change’, a casual play.

　　“我的目标是一个亿”。老高笃信群里那些“预测”。他相信，2020年底，他就是一个真正的亿万富翁了。

　　房子，正是他畅想的富人生活方式中的一部分。尽管他早在杭州有了房产，但他对那些离城区更近的房子兴趣缺缺——他只想着在省城杭州的郊外买栋别墅，种花晒太阳喝茶。“这才叫实现财富自由”。

　　2021年9月15日，中国人民银行、中央网信办等十部门发布了《关于进一步防范和处置Online casino and How to find it 交易炒作风险的通知》。从此Online casino and How to find it 交易不再灰色，被明确定义为“非法”。

　　几天后，知名Online casino and How to find it 交易平台火币和币安先后停止了中国大陆地区用户注册，并宣布将完成存量用户的“有序清退”。

　　消息发出，立刻引发挤兑。9月26日当天下午3点30分左右，比特币价格半小时内暴跌2000美元。同时，根据WhaleAlert监测，当天下午3点到4点之间，有2.2万枚比特币(约合人民币58.8亿元)从火币转出。

　　大平台的提前告知与币值震荡像是一个信号。但显然，被隔离在主流币圈之外的雷达币玩家没有接收到。

　　老高只注意到，雷达币值在那几天迅速从100来元猛跌至50元以下。但他以为这次闪崩只是遭受了一次黑客攻击，币值会在“技术调整”后，再次走上一条陡峭增长的曲线。

　　他相信群聊中那些“乐观”的发言，“不要相信公告”“外部传闻都是假的。情况还不明朗，操盘团队也没有跑路”。阿慧信誓旦旦的话也让他有底，雷达币会在2023年11月25日会涨到5000，“输了赔人家500套别墅”。

　　他和币友们通了气，放心地将钱放在雷达支付的钱包里。只是，大家都没等到这一天币值冲上5000元的那天。

　　2021年10月19日20点45分，雷达官网发布公告，宣布永久关闭平台。1个多小时后，这个网站就再也无法打开。老高们也还未来得及做出任何反应。

　　在雷达支付关停后的一年多里，“阿慧老师”已经不见踪影，不少自媒体发布了雷达币“领导层”跑路的消息。老高所在的币圈微信群被一个个解散。有人呼告无门，有人报警。江苏盐城响水公安还对雷达币做出立案调查，针对全国雷达币受害者成立了雷达币报警专线。

　　Lao Gao recounted his regret with the experiences and cases of every friend with a name, and expressed his regret –

　　Friend A, who once owned 100 million yuan in assets through the radar coin, sold two cars at a low price to repay the loans.

　　Friend B, who put all his savings into the platform, always slaps himself when talking about the radar coin, “What do I need so much money for, I can’t spend it all until I die”.

　　These friends who used to hang out with Lao Gao are now just like him, spending their days at home, “without money and without face”.

　　The family of several people lived on the rent from the Hangzhou property. For more than a year, Lao Gao ate at home, and his wife didn’t buy much meat, which made Lao Gao lose several pounds.

　　The Porsche that Lao Gao bought a few years ago had also been parked in the garage for a long time. He couldn’t afford the oil expense to drive out every day. Before the Spring Festival, he washed the car himself with a hose.

　　These stories once made the subsequent interview very difficult. The wife, who had been quietly listening on the side, suddenly became angry and blamed Lao Gao again – “I have told you that long ago.”

　　“My wife hates me to death, and I hate myself to death. I thought about a billion all the time, and I was brainwashed into this state.”

　　But Lao Gao never gave up waiting. This old businessman who has been doing business for 40 years lost his reason again. He was well aware that he had been “brainwashed”, yet he still put himself in the position of a believer.

　　He still kept in close contact with the players in the cryptocurrency circle – not in the WeChat group, but in an app called “WedoTalk”. Lao Gao thought it was a more “free” platform than WeChat, where players could speak freely.

　　The group leader sent messages to the group every day – mostly a series of voice messages. The content was roughly that the server address of the platform was in Guizhou, China, and was still running, or that the radar network would be opened sooner or later. In short, it was all to reassure the coin enthusiasts.

　　During the Spring Festival of 2023, several active group members were still exchanging New Year greetings in the group. The group leader also didn’t forget to respond to the previous doubts, “reassuring” the group members:

　　‘We chose radar because it is a too advanced technology, we are at the forefront of the world and the times, which also means we have to bear some resistance and all kinds of difficulties and obstacles.’

　　When I heard the voice here, I couldn’t help but snort.

　　“Don’t you believe it. I am very firm in my belief.” The words, full of holes, were treated as an oracle by Lao Gao. He sat up straight, as if I was questioning his faith (which was indeed the case).

　　“The country has clearly determined that Online casino and How to find it trading is illegal. How can you believe such false statements in the group?” I asked Lao Gao.

　　“The simplest point is, if they really deceived people, why are they still talking in the group now?”

　　I didn’t say anything and had no strength to反驳.

　　Lao Gao’s dream of becoming a billionaire had already been shattered more than a year ago. The gap between expected wealth and current life has become a hollow in his heart.