Chapter 13: Who Can Run The Fastest
One hour later, Wang Heng and his father returned home.
That rip-off machine priced at five thousand but only worth four thousand was, of course, smoothly returned. Five thousand in cash safely returned to his father’s bank card.
Then Wang Heng turned on the computer and placed an order on Jindong. It was also a machine priced at five thousand, but with solid specs. After placing the order, Wang Heng pointed at the computer specs table and gave a rundown on the graphics card and CPU…
After listening, his father couldn’t help but feel a bit puzzled: “When did you learn about all this stuff? You’re a third year of senior high school student—shouldn’t you be studying properly instead of thinking about computers all day?”
Wang Heng shrugged: “I looked it up after the Gaokao. It doesn’t affect my studies.”
“What about Bitcoin then?” His father remembered the topic they had discussed a few days ago. “You only started looking into that after the Gaokao too?”
“Yeah, since I’ve decided to study computer science. Plus, I’ve always been pretty interested in this stuff, and now I have time, so it’s normal for me to look into it myself.”
As he spoke, Wang Heng stood up, casually closed the shopping webpage, and yielded the computer.
But his father didn’t immediately open the game client like he usually did. Instead, he frowned in contemplation for a moment. Suddenly, he said: “I put some money in a fixed deposit last year, about twenty or thirty thousand. It was originally meant for your university tuition fee…”
Wang Heng detected something off: “Originally?”
“I looked into it. The university you’re going to doesn’t have high tuition—one year is only about five thousand. Twenty thousand would cover four years of tuition. Of course, there’s also accommodation fee and all sorts of miscellaneous expenses… But if I give it all to you, I definitely won’t need to support you for the first two years of undergrad, right?”
“Twenty or thirty thousand, all to me at once?”
His father scratched his head: “Didn’t you say you were really bullish on that Bitcoin? If you’re bullish, just invest. Anyway, the money is for you. How much you use for investment and how you invest it—you handle it yourself.”
Wang Heng couldn’t help but feel a bit surprised: “You have that much confidence in me?”
Wang Jian said seriously: “This is a father’s confidence.”
However, rather than calling it ‘a father’s confidence,’ Wang Heng was more inclined to believe it was his performance confronting the shady merchant in Computer City that boosted his father’s confidence.
Wang Heng laughed: “Alright then, but not just the first two years—you won’t need to shell out money anymore after that either.”
“Don’t boast, kid!”
————
Jindong’s logistics were indeed fast.
Wang Heng soon received that laptop computer. Unboxing, installing the system, then adding some necessary software. After getting all that done, he opened the Bitcoin trading platform.
Because it was a foreign platform, the pure English made it a bit hard for him to read. But he glanced at the current trading price and immediately felt much more reassured.
Before his rebirth, he was of course aware of Bitcoin’s hype, but unfortunately he hadn’t invested any money in it. Of course, what gave him the biggest headache those years was that brutal asura field—there wasn’t much money left in his bank account, so naturally there was no demand for investment.
But now it was different. Since it was rebirth, if he didn’t take advantage of his foresight, would he even be human?
His memory of Bitcoin’s specific trajectory wasn’t all that clear. But he vaguely remembered that it seemed to be in his first semester at university when this thing suddenly blew up in the country. The power of ‘whatever the Chinese buy rises’ showed its might for the first time, pushing Bitcoin from an international price of one to two hundred dollars all the way up to over a thousand!
Converted to RMB, that was from over one thousand yuan to seven thousand yuan, and in just a short few dozen days. That speed was like being on drugs—no one would believe it if you said it before it happened.
This would be Bitcoin’s peak in the next few years, with a very short window period. By the end of the year in December, the domestic financial regulatory department’s attitude toward Bitcoin would become clear—banned. Before that, he had to sell off in time, because a big drop would follow, and it wouldn’t rise back for a few years.
What Wang Heng wanted to seize was this short window period.
Struggling a bit as he browsed those English webpages, Wang Heng muttered to himself:
“Still around one hundred dollars per coin right now… Recent news says the Siam government might ban Bitcoin trading, major negative news, so it dropped another wave? Good thing—before the Fed gets bullish on it, the next two or three months… should be enough time…”
Two or three months—the chips Wang Heng could use were just what his father gave him plus what he earned from working. Before the peak arrived, if he kept earning at the part-time job at the milk tea shop pace, he could probably save a few thousand yuan. Subtracting necessary school expenses, it would be at most around thirty thousand yuan.
“Sixfold return would be one hundred eighty thousand… Pretty good, but still feels unsatisfying… So time to do this line of work!”
Wang Heng closed the exchange page and opened two programmer outsourcing order-taking platforms. These were the two biggest order-taking platforms domestically—Wang Heng planned to register accounts on both and list himself.
Compared to part-time work at a milk tea shop with no barriers, the market price for writing code was naturally much higher. In the same time, writing more code would let him save more money, then use it as chips for Bitcoin trading. That way, three hundred thousand or even five hundred thousand wouldn’t be a pipe dream…
Wang Heng wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth and realized another issue.
About the part-time job at the milk tea shop, he should talk to the shop manager. It didn’t earn much, and there was a girl who kept harassing him—shouldn’t he quit this troublesome job ASAP?
————
“You don’t want to work anymore?”
The shop manager stared at the young man in front of him, his face full of surprise.
Wang Heng said seriously: “Yeah, thank you very much for taking care of me, Shop Manager, but I have some matters at home, so…”
“You’re still a student, right? What matters at home would need you to handle?”
“…Going on a long trip, travel.”
After thinking, Wang Heng figured this excuse was the most ordinary and reasonable.
The shop manager hesitated a bit too. From his expression, he clearly didn’t want to just let the employee go, like he had some unspeakable difficulty.
The problem was that a milk tea shop employee position really had no barriers, and it was summer vacation now—sticking a poster at the doorway could easily recruit a new employee. What was there to be difficult about?
After hesitating for a bit, the shop manager finally said: “To be honest, you only need to persevere for one more week. After that, even if you wanted to work, you couldn’t. These past few days I’ve been talking with the landlord—next month, this shopfront has to be returned to him.”
Now it was Wang Heng’s turn to be surprised: “You’re quitting?”
The shop manager spread his hands innocently: “You’ve worked here for so many days—you should be able to tell if the shop is making or losing money.”
Wang Heng: “Your employees are all low-paid part-timers, and even with such low labor costs it doesn’t work?”
The shop manager’s face was full of melancholy: “It doesn’t work… So just stick it out for this one week. Coming in less is fine. It’s the final stretch—stand your last post, help me out and save me some trouble, okay? Worst case, I’ll give you a bit more salary.”
Wang Heng suddenly got curious: “How much have you lost running this milk tea shop?”
The shop manager looked speechless at the sky and held up three fingers.
Wang Heng guessed: “Thirty thousand?”
“Three hundred thousand!”
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