At five in the morning, my phone was vibrating like crazy.

I opened my eyes, still groggy, reached over to unlock it—and the moment the trading app popped up, I was instantly wide awake.

Bitcoin, below 105,000. Ethereum, couldn't even hold 3,600. The whole screen was red, like it was mocking me.

I stared at it for a few seconds, then quietly exited. Another 800,000 gone from my account.

This is already my tenth year in the space, and the seventh time I've experienced this kind of "epic" crash. But if you ask me which one hurt the most? It's never days like today.

The real pain was that summer in 2017.

Back then, I put all 3 of my coins into some unheard-of altcoin. In seven days, my account shot up from 60,000 to 7.2 million, a 120x gain.

I was totally floating at the time, posting in my friend circle every day about how "one day in crypto is like a year in the real world." Looking back now, that wasn’t bold talk—it was just foolishness, blinded by the bull market.

Ten years later, I finally get it:

This space isn’t heaven, it’s a battlefield. Survival never depends on luck—it depends on ironclad discipline.

I traded three lives for three iron rules:

First, never go all in. As long as you’re alive, there will always be more opportunities.

Second, always set a stop loss. Cutting losses isn’t admitting defeat—it’s saving your life.

Third, switch tracks when you need to. If you stubbornly hold onto the wrong coin, it’ll never reach the price you’re hoping for.

This morning, there were still people in the community shouting “buy the dip.”