Humanity x leverage, a portrait of crypto gamblers

By ChandlerZ, Foresight News

“You think you’re trading, but you’re just pulling the lever on a slot machine.”

The crypto market, especially contract trading, operates 24 hours a day, with leverage as high as 100 times, and there is no warning of liquidation. There is no need to wear suits, place bets, or sign orders. Even emotions can be expressed in the form of emoticons. It can be said to be one of the most hidden yet most efficient addiction machines in the crypto world.

Cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schur wrote the book "Bait of Luck" through long-term field research on slot machine players in Las Vegas. The book presents a panoramic view of the gambling industry, individual gamblers and the basic concepts of modern society, and also reveals a cruel reality.

The most dangerous thing is not losing money, but the "machine maze" itself - the mental state in which you know you are sinking but still can't stop.

In this seemingly technology-driven, free-gaming land, we see more and more gamblers falling into the abyss. Their identities, experiences, and intelligence vary, but their fates are surprisingly the same: in front of the huge slot machine of contract trading, they are repeatedly fed and swallowed by themselves.

Their story is the story of how we are designed to be addicted.

The fall of a deputy factory manager: from a well-off family to a deeply indebted family

Recently, a well-known up-host on Bilibili named "Feng Ge Wang Ming Tian Ya" (Feng Ge) released a self-narrated video with the online title "Rebirth in Zhejiang", which quickly sparked heated discussion.

According to "Zheli Chongsheng"'s self-introduction, he was once the deputy director of a coal washing plant under a large state-owned enterprise in Handan, Hebei Province, a deputy section-level cadre, with a monthly salary of 9,000 yuan after tax. He had a complete house and car at home, and lived a comfortable and stable life. After getting married in 2018, he and his wife had a daughter and a harmonious family atmosphere.

He said that his life at that time was "not as good as some, but better than some" and he was considered a winner in life in the eyes of others.

But now, everything has changed. His life was shattered by the contract transaction.

Before Chongshengge got involved in the cryptocurrency circle, he briefly participated in stamp and coin trading, and did not lose money, and even made a small profit of 10,000 or 20,000 yuan. This experience did not alert him to the risks of speculation, but instead planted a fluke mentality. He became obsessed with the idea that he could make money without going to work.

He officially joined the industry in 2020. At first, he started with spot trading, making a small investment of a few hundred yuan to test the waters. But soon, the initial "successes" completely shattered his view of money, with a return of 40%, 50% in a short period of time, and even "making 40,000 or 50,000 yuan a day." The huge positive and negative feedback destroyed his confidence in traditional work.

After losing all his capital for the first time, Chongshengge did not retreat but took a more radical approach: borrowing money to open contracts. He tried 10x, 50x, and even 100x leverage; borrowing money, online loans, and credit cards, each time just to "try again", not even to get rich, but to "get back the money".

At first, I convinced myself to set a stop loss, but every time it was actually triggered, I would cancel it.

"Afraid of missing the rebound."

In the video, he described his situation as "cutting meat with a blunt knife". He deposited 20,000 today and lost money, so he deposited another 20,000 tomorrow. At first, it was mainstream coins, and later it was altcoins and air coins. The more he invested, the smaller the coins became, and the more he gambled, the more desperate he became.

Later, he couldn't even borrow money online. He had no choice but to ask relatives and friends for help, and made up all kinds of excuses to borrow money. He "rushed in and gambled again and again", but his position was liquidated again and again. Four times of liquidation, four times of filling the hole:

• The first time he lost 220,000 yuan, his parents and relatives helped him pay it off;
• The second time he lost 300,000 yuan, he had to rely on relatives to help him out;
• The third time he lost 650,000 yuan, and he sold the house his sister had prepared for her marriage for 500,000 yuan, which barely filled the hole;
• The fourth time it collapsed completely, the total debt exceeded one million and was unable to be repaid.

In the end, he resigned from his position in the state-owned enterprise, his wife submitted a divorce agreement, his father sent a decisive text message "This family doesn't have you", and his five-year-old daughter only knew that "Dad went to work in another place."

To avoid debt collection, he rented a single room in the suburbs for 600 yuan a month, and drove an online car-hailing service for 13-14 hours a day, making 300 yuan a day. After deducting the car rental and meal expenses, he had less than 100 yuan left. His smart watch kept vibrating with debt collection calls and text messages, some of which threatened to send mass messages to the address book.

In front of the camera, Chongshengge admitted that he had "long been numb to numbers", and the profits and losses in online loans and contracts seemed like empty buttons. His biggest regret was not losing money, but "destroying a good family with my own hands".

But the real problem is that it is almost impossible to repay the millions of dollars of debt with compounded interest by driving and tightening one's belt, and once the market picks up again, the "urge to make up for the loss" may rekindle at any time.

The tragedy of Rebirth Brother is a perfect example of the "machine maze" revealed in the book "Luck's Bait", an addictive space carefully designed by technology to make people immersed, out of control and eventually escape. Traditional gambling still has intervals, but the cryptocurrency market is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the instant feedback of high leverage compresses the cycle of risk and return to the extreme. This perfectly replicates the core addictive mechanism of the gambling machine "quick operation, immediate feedback".

The concept of flow proposed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is often used to describe positive immersive experiences. But Schur pointed out sharply that machine gambling provides a pseudo-flow of "backward escape", which does not bring any self-realization, but only means losing oneself in repetitive behavior.

Reborn Brother is undoubtedly a typical example of "escaping backwards". He is not creating value, but trying to use a virtual sense of control to fight against the powerlessness of reality in a consumable system. From the initial desire to "get rich" to the later desperate "return of capital", his goal has long been distorted. Selling his sister's wedding house and betraying everyone's trust, these actions show that he has sacrificed everything in reality to that virtual "maze".

Liang Xi - the emotional explosion machine with flow

If the deputy director of a state-owned enterprise is a victim of the contract casino, then Liang Xi is a reveler in the casino. Unlike the slow collapse of the deputy director, Liang Xi's "gambler's life" is more like a grand theater centered around digital profits and losses and social performances. He did not sink quietly, but used traffic and emotions to put himself at the center of public attention again and again.

Liang Xi first became popular during the 519 crash in 2021. On that day, Bitcoin recorded a 33% intraday decline, and the entire market collapsed like the end of the world. Liang Xi, who was only 19 years old, made nearly 40 million yuan with a 1,000 yuan short position, and has since been dubbed the "genius trader in the cryptocurrency circle."

This is a true "birth of a hero" climax: low cost, high return, independent judgment, and fighting against the market.

But this is also the most dangerous beginning, the bait of luck appears.

A successful large bet is enough to create the illusion of continuous betting. The obsession that I can do it again will make people keep trying to replicate that luck. Liang Xi never really got over the "big lottery" that day. He spent four years trying to reproduce it while being completely lost.

According to the book, machine gambling simplifies risk into a repetitive on/off, yes/no, win/lose, start/end, have/have-not… Every time you take a risk, you can see the result immediately through simple operations. Fast operation and immediate feedback are the needs that only high-speed machines can meet.

In subsequent transactions, Liang Xi continued to operate with high leverage, often making mistakes, with profits and losses rising and falling, and eventually accumulating debts of more than 200 million yuan. He once publicly disclosed that he "had no source of income" and relied on loans to maintain transactions. He also claimed that he had suffered emotional betrayal, a breakup with his parents, a mental breakdown, and attempted self-harm several times.

But at the same time, he maintains a high level of social media activity. He posts screenshots of real trading to show the ups and downs of profits and losses; he "scatters red envelopes" on social platforms every time he makes a comeback to create a buzz; he constantly fights with other cryptocurrency KOLs to attract attention; he publishes private life disputes, emotional collapse, mental illness, etc. to build a "real but extreme" persona.

His social media is no longer an information release platform, but a "second exchange" for emotional gambling. Liquidation, turning over, crying, throwing money, revenge, every wave of emotions fluctuates in sync with the market, and every plunge or rebound is part of the plot. Liang Xi is not just a participant, he is more like a self-directed playwright, relying on continuous and violent emotional fluctuations to consolidate his position in the attention rankings of the cryptocurrency circle.

This coincides with the description of the "machine maze" in "Luck's Lure". Addicted players will closely bind their emotions to betting. Once they sink into the maze, time, space, and self-awareness will disappear, and there is only one thing left: continue to bet.

The reason why Liang Xi can maintain traffic for a long time is that he makes himself a never-ending emotional betting machine. Market fluctuations are his plot structure, and profit and loss figures are his emotional drive.

In the maze of machines, individuals gradually become numb to winning or losing, and their purpose changes from "winning and leaving" to "continuous existence". Liang Xi no longer pursues a one-time profit and exit, but instead uses the extreme volatility of crypto contracts to continuously provide topics and emotional anchors for his Liang family army.

What’s even more ironic is that despite the repeated failures and scandals, he still has believers, and many people are even willing to transfer money to his public account and voluntarily become his creditors. The perfect mapping of the social addiction structure in the encryption scenario, individuals are not only addicted to the system, but also bound by group identity, forming a tolerance space where "failure is also worthy of praise."

The reason why Liang Xi is special is not because he is crazy, but because he accurately interprets the "algorithmic value of a madman."

James Wynn - the "No. 1 Gambler in the Market" who became popular on the blockchain

If we put aside conspiracy theories and unconfirmed speculations, James Wynn is more like an extreme example of a technical gambler in the cryptocurrency circle. His popularity stems from a jaw-dropping number: in just 70 days, he increased the profit of his contract account from 0 to 87 million US dollars.

Everything happens on Hyperliquid, and the entire chain is transparent. Every contract opening and closing, his profit record and position fluctuations are watched by the community in real time. He himself frequently tweeted, saying that he "had never played contracts before" and that he was just an "improvised transformation" from a Meme coin trader and succeeded by accident.

This epic roller coaster journey quickly attracted tens of thousands of followers. In just a few weeks, James's social media followers exceeded 380,000. His account status once became a barometer of the market and even affected market sentiment.

At the end of May 2025, after experiencing continuous profits, James Wynn's position experienced a sharp pullback.

70 days, $87 million in profits, almost wiped out in just 5 days.

He himself also confessed on social media: "I just want to recover my lost profits, and at the same time I don't want to look like an idiot who made 100 million and lost it all. I became greedy and I didn't take the numbers on the screen seriously."

From this point on, James' tweets became more radical and dramatic. He changed his social profile picture to "McDonald's Wojak", mocking himself for having "fallen back to the bottom" and for having to work.

But he did not stop the operation. In early June, he announced the suspension of trading, and a few hours later he posted a position chart of newly opened long orders, claiming that it was to "fight against corrupt market makers." He also named Wintermute and accused him of "sniping personal positions."

The most controversial operation occurred at the brink of liquidation. James Wynn published an on-chain address and publicly raised USDC, saying that the funds would be used to maintain positions and reduce liquidation risks. He promised that "if the transaction is successful, it will be returned at a 1:1 ratio." In the end, he raised about 39,000 USDC through this address, and indeed used it to increase margin and maintain position security.

This move was ridiculed by many as "high-end begging". As a result of this wave of operations, his Bitcoin positions did turn from being on the verge of liquidation to being profitable, and his positions once turned losses into hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the good luck did not last long. With the violent market fluctuations, James Wynn's account eventually suffered a major loss again. On-chain data shows that his principal loss has approached 22 million US dollars.

The controversy surrounding James Wynn did not end with his losses. Some community users called him a scripted traffic master, believing that while his public account fluctuated drastically, he might have held a hedging address in secret to conduct reverse transactions. Some also speculated that he had a marketing interest relationship with Hyperliquid officials.

In mid-June, the on-chain detective @dethective published a long article analyzing James' on-chain invitation rebate data, transaction timestamps and token overlap, speculating that he may have hedged through hidden addresses. The blogger believes that James' public account is often on the "loss" side, while another high-frequency trading address makes transactions in the opposite direction and has never been liquidated, with stable profits. Currently, the hidden address has a profit of over 4 million US dollars.

However, as of now, this statement has not been responded to by the person himself or verified by the signature on the chain. It is still speculation by the community and there is no conclusion yet.

But in any case, a transaction clue with an apparent loss of over $100 million is enough to show that James Wynn’s on-chain ups and downs are actually a digital reproduction of "Bait of Luck" in the crypto world.

summary

In the highly leveraged contract market, so-called investment often quickly degenerates into behavioral addiction. The principal is no longer capital for appreciation, but chips to keep the game running. The random fluctuations of the market, the high-speed UI/UX of the exchange, and the emotional amplification of social media together build a closed system.

There are no dealers or chips here, only a series of operational pleasures of constant refresh, encouragement of reinvestment, and instant liquidation. These platforms capture the attention of traders with nearly perfect human-machine circuit logic. Operation feedback is immediate, profit and loss figures are stimulating, and the next order is always waiting for the moment to be clicked.

The core of gambling addiction is not winning or losing money, but a precisely designed state of immersion. This is a gray area between numbness and flow, where people temporarily forget their identity, the existence of money and time, and only synchronize with the rhythm of the machine in front of them, treating each operation as an end in itself, rather than a means to a certain end.

It precisely exploits the human desire for pleasure and certainty, trapping traders in a cycle of losing more and more, and the more they gamble, the more they want to gamble. This explains why many traders irrationally engage in revenge trading after losses. Their goal is no longer to make money rationally, but to immediately eliminate the pain caused by losses and return to the illusion that "I am still in control of everything."

What is even more deceptive is that "failure" is often packaged as the illusion of "almost winning". Just like the illusion of cryptocurrency traders when their floating profits are swallowed up by reversals. If I hold on for ten more seconds, replenish the margin again, and bet on the direction again, maybe I can "get my money back". Schur calls this phenomenon the "near miss effect", which is one of the most commonly used psychological weapons in casinos. It does not defeat your confidence, but makes you mistakenly believe that success is within reach.

"What players pursue is not winning money, but maintaining the state of betting itself." When we turn our attention to the crypto market, this sentence is like a footnote written exclusively for those high-frequency traders and crypto gamblers who watch the screen at four in the morning.