编辑|吴区块链本文编辑引用已获得相关方授权。鼓励读者在亚马逊上购买正式版并支持其慈善目的。本文根据CZ的回忆录《金钱自由》及相关材料改编。本书为第一人称回忆录，其内容基于作者个人的记忆、理解和看法。书中还指出，不应将其视为法律陈述或司法证据材料；相关事实仍应与公共资源结合起来阅读。 CZ 生活中的挫折很少是单一的、戏剧性的跌倒。更多的时候，它们表现为一些看似稳定的东西突然失败：语言失败、住房失败、职业道路失败、公司选址失败、外部判断失败，最终连行动自由都被暂时剥夺。 储藏室里的男孩 1989年，12岁的CZ与母亲和妹妹来到温哥华。他父亲的一位朋友开着一辆旧雪佛兰去机场接他们。对于一个来自中国小城市和大学校园生活的孩子来说，即使是一辆小汽车也已经是很重要的事情了。
ew. 在加拿大的第一周，一家四口挤在 UBC 学生宿舍区的一个单间里。房间里挤满了两张双层床。浴室位于走廊尽头，厨房是共用的。后来，他们搬进了 UBC 教员宿舍区的一栋联排别墅。比以前宽敞了一些，但仍然不足以为一家四口合理分配空间。他的父母和妹妹各有一间卧室。 CZ的“房间”是楼上的一个小储藏室。当一张床垫放进去后，三个侧面都接触到了墙壁。每天，他只能从床垫脚爬进去睡觉。房间没有窗户，也没有多余的空间。它几乎只有一件事的用处：躺着。看到他睡了这么久，他的妹妹会尽一切努力。
Editor | WuBlockchain
The editorial citations in this article have been authorized by the relevant parties. Readers are encouraged to purchase the official edition on Amazon and support its charitable purpose.
This article is based on CZ’s memoir Freedom of Money and related materials. The book is a first-person memoir, with its contents based on the author’s personal memories, understanding, and views. The book also notes that it should not be treated as a legal statement or judicial evidentiary material; relevant facts should still be read in conjunction with public sources.
CZ’s setbacks in life were rarely single, dramatic falls. More often, they appeared as the sudden failure of something that had seemed stable: language failed, housing failed, a career path failed, the company’s location failed, external judgment failed, and eventually even his freedom of movement was temporarily taken away.
The Boy in the Storage Room
In 1989, 12-year-old CZ arrived in Vancouver with his mother and sister. A friend of his father picked them up at the airport in an old Chevrolet. For a child who had come from a small Chinese city and university campus life, even a small car was already something new.
During their first weeks in Canada, the family of four squeezed into a single room in the UBC student residence area. The room was packed with two bunk beds. The bathroom was at the end of the hallway, and the kitchen was shared. Later, they moved into a townhouse in the UBC faculty housing area. It was more spacious than before, but still not enough to properly allocate space for a family of four.
His parents and sister each had a bedroom. CZ’s “room” was a small storage room upstairs. Once a single mattress was placed inside, three sides touched the walls. Every day, he could only crawl in from the foot of the mattress to sleep. The room had no window and no extra space. It was almost only useful for one thing: lying down.
Seeing him sleep there for so long, his sister would offer every few weeks to switch rooms with him, letting him sleep in a real bedroom for a few days. The family had little that could be redistributed. What could be redistributed was only a few square meters of space, who slept in which bed, and who could get a few more days of air. Later, when CZ wrote about this storage room, he did not present it as especially painful. He said the small space actually made him feel safe.
The Captain Who Could Not Speak
Another obstacle CZ faced in Canada was language. When he first arrived in Vancouver, his English was poor, so he had to start in ESL classes. Two years later, he entered regular classes, while in math he was moved up two grades. Math became a system he could steadily understand before English did.
But the truly embarrassing problem was his stutter. In grades nine and ten, his stutter was so severe that eight or nine times out of ten, he would get stuck whenever he tried to speak. The more important the occasion, the harder it became to get the words out. Yet he was also the captain of the volleyball team and needed to communicate with referees during matches. When the whole court’s attention was on him, he often became too nervous to make a sound. A captain could not smoothly argue for his team. A person who would later spend years facing the media, users, regulators, and courts had, in his youth, one of his greatest difficulties in public speaking.
He also served as an assistant coach for the girls’ volleyball team in the same grade. At the time, his stutter was severe, and it became even more obvious when he spoke with girls. The players did not mock him the way boys did. Whenever he got stuck, a simple gesture was enough for the girls to understand what he wanted to say.
Later, the school counselor, Sheila, brought him into her office and told him that professional speech therapists could help. She knew he had no money and recommended a retired speech therapist who was willing to coach him for free. The therapist had a dent near his eyebrow from a car accident and poor eyesight, but he was willing to help. CZ went to see him twice a week. After a few weeks, his stutter was largely relieved.
After Selling His Apartment, Bitcoin Fell by Two-Thirds
He sold his three-bedroom apartment in Pudong, Shanghai, and converted a large portion of the money into Bitcoin, at an average price of around $600. Soon after, Mt. Gox collapsed, and Bitcoin fell to around $200. The apartment had already been sold. The money had become numbers on a screen, and those numbers had quickly shrunk by two-thirds.
His mother could not understand it. She asked him why he did not find a respectable job, why he wanted to start a company, and why he had to get involved with Bitcoin. The book says that during that period, his mother often wanted to smack the back of his head and ask why he could not work a decent job like his sister, and why he had to foolishly pursue entrepreneurship and Bitcoin. CZ himself was not entirely without doubt. He wondered whether most people were wrong, or whether he alone was wrong. But in the end, he did not sell his Bitcoin. At the time, he did not have much he could use to explain his decision, at least not enough to reassure his mother. The apartment was gone, and the paper loss was there. He could only remain inside his own judgment.
On the Day BNB Launched, the Screen Was Full of Sell Orders
At noon on July 14, 2017, Binance officially launched. After the countdown ended, BNB trading opened. CZ and the technical team stared at the screen. Very soon, the trading page was filled with sell orders. Buy orders were scarce, and the price began to edge downward. A few hours earlier, people had still been chasing allocations of BNB. But once trading opened, it seemed as if everyone was selling. The mood in the office changed rapidly. Xiaofang, the front-desk employee who had been recording the historic moment on her phone, quietly put her phone down and returned to her desk. In the chat rooms, insults began to pour in, with some even cursing his ancestors. Users saw only one thing: the token they had bought was falling.
What CZ faced was not an abstract market, but a group of people who had just entrusted him with their money. They might not understand whether the trading system was stable, and they might not care how many functions the team had launched. What they directly felt was loss. For a platform that had just gone live, this emotion could quickly turn into a run-like collapse of trust.
Over the following weeks, the lights in Binance’s office were almost always on overnight. The team launched APIs, zero fees, more tokens, mobile apps, a new UI, and multilingual versions. But these developments did not immediately show up in BNB’s price in the short term. CZ’s choice was to livestream every other day. People were still insulting him in the comments. He did not hide behind PR statements. Instead, he appeared repeatedly, telling users that the team was still there and that work was still moving forward.
The Late-Night Evacuation Before September 4
Less than two months after Binance launched, regulatory pressure arrived in China.
In early September 2017, CZ and He Yi heard that a crackdown announcement might come the next day. Late at night, they called a meeting with the core team and decided that some members should leave China immediately. He Yi had only recently moved to Shanghai. Her mother had fallen a few days earlier and injured her tailbone, making her unable to walk. In the middle of the night, He Yi woke her mother and told her she had to leave for Tokyo immediately. Heina did not have a Japanese visa, so she could only go to Thailand first, while her two-year-old child was still sleeping at home.
The next day, seven Chinese ministries and commissions issued the September 4 notice, banning the operation of cryptocurrency exchanges and ICOs, and requiring projects that had issued ICOs to refund investors in full. Binance was later often described as a “headquarterless” global company. But this structure was not an ideal form designed from the beginning. It was forced into being by early regulatory shocks. CZ’s early habit of moving frequently and not relying on heavy physical assets was transformed here into a company-level capacity for relocation: when one place could no longer continue, move immediately to another.
Problems followed. Being headquarterless brought flexibility, but it also produced a long-term controversy in regulatory narratives. In the years that followed, Binance benefited from global mobility while also being repeatedly asked: where exactly is it? Who regulates it? Which entity bears responsibility? September 2017 was not simply a moment of “leaving China.” It was one of the sources of all the regulatory tensions Binance later faced. Under survival pressure, the company chose mobility; regulators, meanwhile, continued to demand that it land again at a clear coordinate.
From CEO to Defendant
In November 2023, CZ voluntarily flew to the United States and pleaded guilty, admitting to violations of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act. According to his account, the core issue was that Binance had served U.S. users in its early years without registering in the United States. In the book, he says there was no fraud, no money laundering, and no loss of user funds. Even so, it was still a concentrated landing point for the long-running pressure that the U.S. regulatory system had placed on Binance.
The real change did not happen only in court. It also happened after he left the CEO position. Before that, he had long lived in a state of high-speed work. Binance’s rhythm was launching, growing, expanding, responding to regulators, handling user issues, and managing internal organizational problems. After pleading guilty, he stepped down as CEO and could no longer participate in Binance’s management. Because the Department of Justice appealed, his original arrangement to leave the United States was overturned, and he had to remain in the country while awaiting sentencing. He had not prepared for a long stay and had to buy winter clothes on short notice.
During Thanksgiving, friends drove from Dallas to visit him. Many restaurants outside were closed. His bodyguard grilled ribs, and the group had some beer. In the end, he was sentenced to four months in prison. He later entered Lompoc to serve his sentence.
After entering Lompoc prison, restrictions became concrete. The facilities were old, and there were mold stains around the air vents. Soon after entering prison, he developed a sore throat and a high fever. When he asked whether he could get medicine, he was told he had to buy it from the commissary, which opened only once every two weeks. During a dental checkup, he casually asked whether he could get his teeth cleaned. He was told he might have to wait one or two years.
There was no real quiet in the cellblock either. Because of the barred metal doors, flushing sounds from across the entire housing area kept coming through. Among two hundred inmates, someone was always using the toilet. Breakfast was usually announced between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning. If he was not ready within one minute, he missed the meal. Breakfast consisted of tasteless cereal, thin milk, and sweet bread. Lunch and dinner were mostly carbohydrates, sugar, imitation meat, and very little vegetable or protein. On Thursday nights, there was a chicken leg, which already counted as a relatively good meal. Over 76 days, he lost 12 jin.
He wrote the first draft of his manuscript in prison. The computers there could not copy and paste, and they could not connect to the internet. If he wanted to adjust a paragraph, he could not drag, cut, or rearrange it as usual. He had to type it all over again. A person long accustomed to using efficient tools to handle matters was, in that place, returned to something close to the typewriter era: no search, no real-time information, no team collaboration. Only memory and a keyboard remained.
Taken together, these experiences do not form a continuous history of suffering. They look more like a series of forced relocations. As a child, CZ moved from the countryside to Hefei, and then from Hefei to Vancouver. In Canada, he first squeezed into a dorm room, then slept in a storage room. Later, he sold his apartment in Shanghai and converted the asset into Bitcoin. After Binance launched, he watched BNB fall on the office screens. Before Chinese regulation landed, the team left overnight. After the U.S. case, he stepped down from the CEO position, stayed in the United States awaiting sentencing, and eventually entered Lompoc. Each relocation took away part of an old life: a room, language, an apartment, an office, a corporate position, freedom of movement. Many of CZ’s later choices appear to be acts of voluntary mobility, but behind them is also the shadow of these early experiences: places can change at any time, rules can change at any time, and there is not much a person can truly take with him. At most, judgment, code, a passport, a computer, and the ability to start again.
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