The Bitcoin That Changed Everything
The winter of 2016 still feels vividly real to me. Even as the last remnants of cold gripped the world in its icy hold, I sold off all one thousand bitcoins I'd bought and forgotten about back in 2011. My average selling price was five hundred thousand won per coin. At the age of twenty-five, I suddenly found myself with a net worth of five hundred million won. The whole thing felt too unreal, too dizzying to process. I remember how the massive sum didn't truly hit me until the cash hit my account. It was only when ten million won of that five hundred million landed in my bankbook, and I withdrew five hundred thousand from the ATM—holding fifty crisp ten-thousand-won bills in my hands—that reality finally slammed into me. I let out a scream of pure joy.
I only told my closest friends, and with equal parts genuine happiness and bragging, I threw a party. I treated them to Korean beef until their stomachs nearly burst. When the card receipt came, the total was one million two hundred thirty thousand five hundred won. My bank balance, including the one point six million I'd scraped together from part-time jobs and manual labor, still hovered in the ten-million range. Meanwhile, the K exchange where I'd sold the bitcoin still showed four hundred ninety million won sitting there.
The day after we gorged ourselves on beef and alcohol with my friends, I woke up with a pounding headache that felt like it might split my skull. That's when the fear started creeping in—what the hell was I supposed to do with this sudden fortune? Back then, bitcoin had a terrible reputation. People associated it with dirty money, shady origins, scams, all of it. I had no idea if it was even safe to withdraw and spend, so I agonized over it alone for days. After scouring the internet, I finally convinced myself it was okay to use. Once that weight lifted, the next question hit: what should I actually do with the money?
I'd studied hard in school, but I was never at the very top. The smartest kid in our class was an otaku who dreamed of becoming a writer. Our homeroom teacher had given him some brutally practical advice—if his grades were only good enough for that kind of university, he should just go the technical route or become a civil servant quickly and pursue his hobby on the side. But teenage passion and hot blood made me ignore every word of that. I was the classic type who only came to his senses after military service. The problem was, waking up didn't automatically make me good at studying. I barely managed to switch majors at a mediocre private university in the provinces, and I scraped by in the absolute dumpster of an economics department—filled with students who slept through every lecture—before graduating. The future didn't look bright for me at all.
I couldn't even earn a million won a month between part-time gigs and backbreaking labor, and I lived so frugally that I only spent about a hundred thousand won on average. To someone like that, five hundred million suddenly appearing was an incomprehensible amount of money. The one saving grace was that I'd graduated from the economics department, so I at least had some basic knowledge about managing finances. It was a tremendous stroke of luck that I possessed even the most rudimentary economic sense, and an even greater blessing that I had people around me who could give me advice on how to grow that capital.
One of my professors during my university days had told me:
"What? Real estate? Isn't that completely at the end of its cycle? With the aging population and everything getting old, isn't it trending downward...? And aren't they building a ton of new apartments in Busan right now?"
"Ah...? I'm not sure I follow, Professor..."
"G-Gangnam?"
"Ah! So you mean the most expensive area in the city is best?"
"Huh? Isn't the stock market something you can profit from if you study it?"
"I see..."
That day, what started as a simple question had spiraled into a complete tangent. The "real" life lesson my professor gave me that day. Remembering it, I immediately started researching real estate. I ended up using about four hundred fifty million won to buy a thirty-pyeong apartment in one of those locations that anyone interested in Busan real estate would immediately recognize. That left me with about fifty million won.
I agonized for a long time over what to do with that remaining money. Should I follow my professor's advice and get into stocks? How much should I start with? The small amounts in the hundred-thousand range that he'd mentioned? But wouldn't the returns be too tiny? The reason I spent so much time worrying was that my entire economic worldview had been completely transformed by the bitcoin incident—both before and after it happened. After making thousands of times my money, a profit of a hundred or two hundred thousand felt pathetically small.
Up until then, I'd believed that saving money meant being frugal, depositing it in a bank, and collecting a hundred or two hundred thousand won in interest over the course of a year. Back then, I had accepted my parents' warnings as absolute truth—that stocks and real estate would lead to ruin, that they were no different from gambling. But after succeeding with bitcoin, the concept of "investment" that I'd never quite understood in university classes finally clicked on a visceral level. The idea that gold loses value the more it's mined, that money loses value the more it's printed, so you should invest in real assets that can at least maintain equivalent value in the future. My eyes had been opened to what people called risky assets: real estate, stocks, gold, dollars, and so on.
I put the question of what to do with the remaining fifty million on hold for a moment and started buying and reading books about stocks. While doing so, I came across content related to future investments and blockchain. Seeing the enormous returns bitcoin had shown, I decided to jump back in. It wasn't that I'd read the books, studied hard, and rationally concluded it had future potential. I wasn't that smart, and I didn't have any particular skills. It was simply that, as the saying goes, only those who've eaten the rice cake know how it tastes. Having already tasted success with bitcoin, it just looked far more attractive to me than anything else.
Of course, even I didn't truly believe that something like cryptocurrency—cyber points with no physical backing—had any real future potential. But unlike stocks, there were no circuit breakers, no daily limit of thirty percent gains, no taxes, and it was a twenty-four-hour gambling den that never closed. Those points stood out to me. Even setting those disadvantages aside, I had no confidence I could make money from stocks against the forces that had been manipulating them for years. If the conditions were the same, I figured bitcoin—which I'd encountered and studied earlier than they had—offered better odds.
With that, I made up my mind to become a full-fledged coin trader. I deposited the fifty million back into the K exchange and bought a hundred bitcoins. That was the beginning of my personal hell.
The market moved twenty-four hours a day. To keep up, I divided each day into six-hour blocks, setting alarms to sleep for one or two hours at a time before waking up to stare at charts. Sometimes the violent swings between skyrocketing and crashing left me unable to sleep as I agonized over whether to take profits or cut losses. I became consumed by opportunity cost, trapped in anxiety and restlessness. The lifestyle completely destroyed my circadian rhythm. My health deteriorated, and I developed insomnia.
Eventually, my mother—who had no idea what was really going on—couldn't stand watching her son live like a worthless shut-in, staring at strange lines going up and down on a screen. Without telling me, she used her connections to force me into the company where I still work to this day. It was a small-to-medium enterprise run by a friend of a friend of my mother's. Being suddenly shoved into a company like that left me dumbfounded at first. I was making over five hundred thousand won on a single day trade if the price moved just one percent—equivalent to five days of hard manual labor. The thought of living like a normal person and commuting to a company job seemed ridiculous.
But I couldn't bring myself to reject the position right then and there, not when my mother had gone to so much trouble out of concern for her unemployed son and her own pride. In the end, I joined as a parachute hire. I ended up shouldering all the hardships of working at a small company—no, a complete jeonso—and suffered through it. The company was far away, so I suddenly had to start dormitory life. I'd forgotten most of my major while coin trading. I was surplus personnel who'd gotten in without any proper test. The job came with a mountain of terrible conditions, and of course the work environment was as uncomfortable as it could possibly be.
The company had started in the warehouse business. Somehow they'd gotten lucky and made a lot of money quickly, so they bought up surrounding land to expand. That wasn't enough—they had ambitions to manufacture and sell their own products, so they even created a subsidiary. Future Warehouse. The President had apparently become completely enamored after hearing from an acquaintance in the clothing industry about using the Future Apparel warehouse. He built a clothing factory and warehouse on the newly purchased land and launched a new business, greatly expanding the company. During that time, many people joined, new departments were created, and some semblance of structure began to form. I came in right around the time when sales and production through personal connections had stabilized somewhat.
My sudden arrival as a parachute hire had caused internal chaos—they'd had to abruptly take down a job posting they'd already put up. Unfortunately, I only learned about all of that much later, after I'd already joined. And honestly, I didn't feel the slightest bit sorry about it. The person who was supposed to have gotten that position should have been thanking me from the bottom of their heart. This entire company—from the President down to the directors, advisors, and department heads—should be bowing their heads to the ground in gratitude and apology every time they see me.
Really. When I think back on all the time that's passed, my teeth grind and my blood boils. Even now, seeing them laugh so shamelessly makes me want to shove a potato right in their smug faces.