编辑|吴区块链本文引用并编辑了 Freedom of Money 的材料，并已获得相关方许可。欢迎读者在亚马逊购买正版，支持慈善事业。 排球、扑克、CS出现在CZ人生的不同阶段：在加拿大读中学时打排球，在上海创业和社交时打扑克，在东京工作期间打CS。它们乍一看似乎很分散，但当放在他移民、工作和创业轨迹的更大弧线中时，它们揭示了一个人如何进入群体、处理输赢、被社交圈所消耗，并最终选择退出某些比赛。 排球 1989年，12岁的CZ与母亲和妹妹来到温哥华。几年后，他就读于 U-Hill 中学。 It was a very small public school located on the UBC campus, with just over 200 students across five grades.学校很小，每个年级只有20个左右的男生，排球队经常没有足够的球员来组成首发阵容。有时恰好有六名球员出场，没有替补。他后来又重新
他说，中学五年，排球几乎占据了他所有的空闲时间。从八年级直到毕业，他每周训练 15 个小时，放学后每天训练 3 个小时。起初，他只是和朋友丹尼尔在后院玩耍。他们几乎无法完成一场集会，但他们玩得越多，就越着迷。几周后，越来越多的朋友加入。到了九年级的时候，他们实际上已经在U-Hill组建了一个团队。这个团队并不强大。球员少，学校小，经常输球。他们的体育老师格拉斯比自告奋勇担任教练，但他曾是一名长跑运动员，并不真正了解排球。他只能一边辅导他们，一边自学排球手册。 CZ去了温哥华酒吧
Editor | WuBlockchain
This article cites and edits material from Freedom of Money with permission from relevant parties. Readers are encouraged to purchase the authorized edition on Amazon and support charity.
Volleyball, poker, and CS appeared at different stages of CZ’s life: volleyball during his secondary school years in Canada, poker during his entrepreneurial and social years in Shanghai, and CS during his time working in Tokyo. They seem scattered at first glance, but when placed within the larger arc of his migration, work, and entrepreneurial trajectory, they reveal how one person entered groups, handled winning and losing, was consumed by social circles, and eventually chose to exit certain games.
Volleyball
In 1989, at the age of 12, CZ arrived in Vancouver with his mother and sister. A few years later, he enrolled at U-Hill Secondary School. It was a very small public school located on the UBC campus, with just over 200 students across five grades. The school was so small that there were only about 20 boys in each grade, and the volleyball team often barely had enough players to form a starting lineup. Sometimes exactly six players showed up, with no substitutes.
He later recalled that during his five years in secondary school, volleyball occupied almost all of his free time. He trained 15 hours a week, three hours every day after school, from Grade 8 until graduation. At first, he was just playing in the backyard with his friend Daniel. They could barely complete a rally, but the more they played, the more hooked they became. A few weeks later, more and more friends joined. By Grade 9, they had actually put together a team at U-Hill.
The team was not strong. There were few players, the school was small, and they lost often. Their PE teacher, Glassby, volunteered to be the coach, but he had been a long-distance runner and did not really understand volleyball. He could only teach himself from a volleyball manual while coaching them. CZ went to the Vancouver Public Library and borrowed the same book. Many times, as soon as the teacher assigned a drill, CZ already knew what would come next.
Later, his teammates elected him captain, a role he held for four years. In the book, he does not turn this episode into a story of a “young leader.” Instead, he writes more about specific, slightly clumsy scenes: a small team that often lost, a teacher learning from a manual while coaching, a student who had already read ahead in the training book, and a group of people repeatedly practicing on the court after school.
During the summer before Grade 10, the UBC varsity team held a volleyball camp. The registration fee was CAD 90. CZ could not afford it, but he still went and sat in the stands to watch. On the afternoon of the first day, Conrad, the captain of the UBC team, noticed him and asked why he was only watching. CZ explained. Conrad simply said, “Come on.” So CZ was invited onto the court to train. Years later, CZ summarized the episode in one sentence: showing up is 80% of success.
Near the end of the camp, he gathered the courage to ask Conrad whether he would be willing to coach the U-Hill volleyball team. Conrad agreed. This young coach later influenced him in ways that went beyond simply improving his skills.
In one key match, U-Hill was trailing 7–14. CZ scored eight consecutive points with jump serves, bringing the score to 15–14. At match point, he worried about making an error and switched to a more conservative standing serve. He did not miss the serve, but they still lost in the end. After the match, Conrad asked him why he had not continued jump serving. CZ explained that, by probability, he was due to make a mistake. Conrad gave him two pieces of advice: always use the jump serve from then on, and never interrupt your own momentum.
That season, U-Hill qualified for the city tournament for the first time in school history. Although the team still lost more than it won, the city tournament organizers awarded the MVP to CZ. That summer, he was selected for the Vancouver city team. At the same time, however, he was working night shifts at a Chevron gas station, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. His training condition fluctuated, and he also missed several matches because of shift work.
When he reached the provincial team tryouts, he lost to physical limitations. He wrote that no matter how hard he trained, his vertical jump could never clear the basic threshold of one meter. His dream of becoming an athlete essentially ended there. In the final two years of high school, he still played volleyball, but it had shifted from a goal into a hobby.
The most interesting part of this experience is not that he won MVP, but that he encountered several concrete constraints very early on: the school was too small, the team was too weak, money was insufficient, and his physical condition was not enough. Volleyball did not give him a teenage script of continuous victories. It was more like a series of practices under local constraints: how to gather enough people, how to train with a non-professional teacher, how to fight for a better coach, how to keep serving when behind, and how to accept that he could not jump beyond a certain line.
Volleyball was also tied to his difficulty with expression at the time. In Grades 9 and 10, CZ had a severe stutter. As captain, he often needed to argue with referees during matches, but the more the entire court focused on him, the more easily he would get stuck. The school counselor, Sheila, brought him to her office and told him he could see a speech therapist. Knowing that he had no money, she recommended a retired therapist who was willing to help him for free. CZ went twice a week, and after four weeks, his stutter had largely improved.
During the same period, he also helped as an assistant coach for the girls’ volleyball team in his grade. Because he was shy, this was one of the few opportunities he had to interact with girls. He adjusted the methods he had learned in his own training and taught them to the team. When he got stuck while speaking, a simple hand gesture was enough for the players to understand. Here, volleyball was not just a sport; it was more like a setting in which a teenager was forced to practice expression, collaboration, and leadership.
Poker
Volleyball took place in Vancouver, where resources were limited and opportunities had to be fought for bit by bit. Poker took place in Shanghai’s entrepreneurial and social circles. By then, CZ had already worked for many years and had begun building his own projects. In the book, he writes that he picked up several new hobbies, the most addictive of which was Texas hold’em.
At first, the big blind was only RMB 1. A few years later, it had risen to RMB 50. Although these were still games among friends, a single night’s wins and losses could reach tens of thousands of yuan. What occupied him more than the money, however, was time. There were poker games two or three times a week, golf once or twice a week, and KTV on evenings without poker. Life looked lively, smooth, and comfortable, but his own assessment was direct: it was very shallow.
Poker games, golf games, and KTV together formed a kind of entrepreneurial social life: many people, much information, and a great deal of time cut away. Poker was not entirely useless entertainment. It did indeed bring him into several important relationships.
In July 2013, at a poker game hosted by an old friend, Cao Darong of Lightspeed China mentioned Bitcoin to CZ and told him it was worth looking into. Also at the table was Bobby Lee, who was preparing to become CEO of BTC China at the time. At dinner the next day, Bobby Lee suggested that CZ convert 10% of his assets into Bitcoin: if it went to zero, which was a small-probability outcome, he would lose only 10%; if it rose tenfold, which was more likely, he would double his money.
In hindsight, one casual conversation at the poker table formally pushed Bitcoin in front of CZ. But placed back in the environment of the time, it looked more like a typical way information flowed in Shanghai’s entrepreneurial, investment, and technology circles: someone mentioned something new at a friends’ game, the conversation continued over dinner the next day, and judgment, relationships, and opportunities intersected in a semi-formal, semi-recreational setting.
By 2015, poker had become a problem that needed to be dealt with. After CZ returned to Shanghai from elsewhere, friends pulled him back into poker games, golf, and gatherings. Poker games started at 8 p.m. People said they would end at midnight, but they often continued until 3 or 4 a.m. The bigger problem was WeChat groups. After noon, people would start discussing which hand from the previous night had been misplayed. By 4 p.m., a new game would be organized. The group chat stayed pinned at the top, constantly pulling his attention back to the table.
Much of the consumption did not happen at the poker table itself, but before and after the game: reviewing hands, organizing games, waiting for people, chatting, and thinking about the next session. It prevented time from remaining in large blocks and instead chopped it into fragments. Later, over a meal, an older friend named Eric, about ten years CZ’s senior, told him that if he could quit poker for two years, he could play however he wanted after that. Eric said that with CZ’s intelligence and emotional intelligence, he could have achieved much bigger things, but he was wasting his life. CZ wrote that the sentence stayed lodged in his mind for several days.
He first tried to reduce the frequency, for example by playing only once a month, but found it did not work. As long as he remained in the group chat, his attention would still be pulled back. In the end, he decided to truly quit poker. The book titles this section as an “epiphany moment: saying goodbye to the poker game.” The so-called epiphany was not the sudden acquisition of some grand belief, but the realization of a small yet stubborn fact: if a person does not exit a particular field, his attention will continue to be requisitioned by that field.
Poker appears in his experience as something contradictory. On the one hand, it was one of the entry points that led him to Bitcoin. On the other hand, it later became a source of consumption that he had to cut off. It brought relationships and opportunities, but also inertia and delay. CZ does not write poker as purely negative, nor does he write that Bitcoin initiation as an act of destiny. What the material presents is more like the real texture of an entrepreneur’s social circle: many opportunities do not appear in meeting rooms, but much time is also consumed in these same places.
CS
During his time working in Tokyo, CZ came into contact with more intense trading system development and formed another set of hobbies: motorcycling, skiing, diving, and Counter-Strike. Among them, he writes about CS lightly, but with a great deal of information embedded in the details. He says he was once addicted to the game and at one point ranked in the top ten in Tokyo. Later, he formed a “foreigner team,” bringing in colleagues, friends, and even his boss. Team matches gradually became their main social activity.
This was different from the social mode of poker. Poker is played around a table, at a slower rhythm, with small talk, waiting, probing, and financial wins and losses. CS is real-time collaboration, fast-paced, and demands reaction speed, division of labor, coordination, and execution. During the Tokyo period, CZ built social interaction around a game that required coordinated combat. It was not about eating together or drinking together, but teaming up to compete.
This type of hobby also had a certain fit with his professional state. In Tokyo, he was working on trading systems, facing speed, stability, real-time judgment, and technical detail. CS is not a financial system, but it similarly rewards reaction speed, spatial judgment, team coordination, and continuous practice. The book does not directly link the two, but the overlap is hard to ignore: someone who handled high-frequency trading systems at work was also immersed after work in a high-intensity, real-time feedback, strongly adversarial system.
However, CS does not occupy much space in the book, nor is it written as some major turning point. It is more like a slice of life from his Tokyo period: a young technologist working abroad, writing systems during the day, and riding motorcycles, skiing, diving, and playing CS in his spare time. Compared with the later poker games in Shanghai, this form of socializing appears more direct and less shaped by social maneuvering.
Taken together, these three lines show that volleyball did not make him an athlete, poker did not only bring him opportunities but also consumed him, and CS was not written as a career turning point but simply as part of his working life in Tokyo. What they have in common is that none of them quite resembles “easy entertainment.” Volleyball involved training, losing, leading a team, and confronting physical boundaries; poker involved socializing, opportunity, addiction, and withdrawal; CS involved ranking, team formation, colleague relationships, and instant collaboration.
The three games also correspond to the realities he faced at different stages: in adolescence, resources were scarce, and he had to show up and fight for opportunities; in Shanghai, relationships were dense, and he had to distinguish opportunity from consumption; in Tokyo, technical work was intense, and even social life was organized into a form of confrontation and collaboration.
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