Recently, the market has slowed down, and some in the circle are starting to shout "The crypto world no longer has dividends, it's time to withdraw."

This sounds reasonable, but in fact, it only tells part of the story.

That's right, the era where you could double your money by closing your eyes and going all-in is gone. Bitcoin surpassing a trillion-dollar market cap is no longer as easy to hype as it was a few years ago. The arbitrage space for ordinary retail investors has been severely compressed, and that's a fact.

But things are not that simple. There's a deeper, more hard truth hidden: the market always turns the "truly awake" into a meat grinder. This is what makes the crypto world both the most painful and the most attractive.

**1. The perpetual motion machine is turning: the vacuum of regulation and human greed**

To understand the cryptocurrency market, you first need to see its fundamental difference from traditional finance.

Traditional finance is like a carefully designed retirement home—insider trading is monitored, financial reports must be truthful, and information must be transparently disclosed. There are many rules, and protections are abundant, but the path to huge profits is also blocked. Cryptocurrency is different; it’s a lawless zone with fuzzy rules. There are no laws prohibiting insider trading, project teams can change rules at any time, teams can operate completely anonymously, and VCs can acquire large stakes with just a few dollars.

Sounds like a nightmare for retail investors, right?

But in the eyes of the most aggressive capital globally, this is paradise. The traditional market’s "tight constraints" are completely ineffective here. The cost to tell a good story or create a new trend is incredibly low.

As a result, a unique "perpetual motion machine" has formed in the crypto market—leaders must continuously create stories of sudden wealth and new narratives to attract a steady stream of new funds and newcomers. Only then can they smoothly offload their chips. Most later entrants become "fuel" for the system’s operation, and the system thus never stops running.

**2. Cycles are essentially a liquidity "plundering race"**

At its core, this is a hunting ground for capital. There are always people entering, always people leaving, and always those who become the fish in the transfer process.