The Difficulty of Sitting on the Throne — Novel Edition
Cultural Note: The original Chinese title is 坐庄之难：一个幸存者的自白 (Zuòzhuāng zhī nán: yīgè xìngcúnzhě de zìbái), meaning “The Difficulty of Sitting on the Throne — A Survivor’s Confession.” A narrative tracing the arc from phone repairman to reluctant dealer.
The Difficulty of Sitting on the Throne A Survivor’s Confession By the Gate Master (门主) 2026
Chapter One: Entering the Game — I Thought Dealers Always Win
June 2017, I first heard about Bitcoin.
It was a Saturday afternoon. I was fixing phones at Huaqiangbei electronics market in Shenzhen. A miner boss complained to me: “Mining BTC isn’t as profitable as just buying it. An S9 rig takes a year to break even, electricity costs are unbearable.”
I asked: “What is Bitcoin?”
He looked at me: “You don’t even know Bitcoin? One Bitcoin is 20,000 RMB right now.”
That was June 10, 2017. BTC price approximately $2,800, roughly 19,000 RMB. His “20,000” was inflated, but I didn’t know that.
我不懂技术，但我懂稀缺。华强北的电子产品，只要稀缺，就能炒。 “I don’t understand technology, but I understand scarcity. Huaqiangbei electronics — anything scarce can be speculated.”
The novel traces a complete arc:
Phase 1 — Retail victim: Phone repairman enters crypto, gets liquidated, experiences all the psychological traps described in Weakness of Retail Traders — FOMO, fear, obsession, revenge trading.
Phase 2 — Reluctant dealer: After surviving as a retail trader, the protagonist gets recruited into a dealer operation. He discovers the other side — not the omnipotent predator he imagined, but a trapped operator facing constant threats: capital chain fragility, co-dealer betrayal, regulatory exposure, on-chain transparency.
Phase 3 — The throne is a trap: The devastating conclusion — sitting on the throne is harder than fighting from the street. A dealer can never exit. Always exposed, always watched, always one step from catastrophic loss. The novel’s title itself is the thesis: 坐庄之难 — “the difficulty of sitting on the throne.”
散户只有两种选择：被割，或者跟庄。但这正是小说要拆解的幻觉。 “Retail traders have only two choices: be harvested, or follow the dealer. But this is exactly the illusion the novel dismantles.”
Why This Matters for Retail Traders
Understanding that dealers are also trapped changes your strategic thinking:
- Stop seeing dealers as omnipotent predators
- Start seeing them as predictable actors with known constraints
- Use dealer constraints as survival intelligence, not as inspiration to become a dealer yourself
The novel format makes the philosophy visceral — readers don’t just understand the dealer’s dilemma; they feel it through narrative empathy.
This chapter is the novel/fiction edition of The Dealer’s Dilemma. The original Chinese text contains approximately 1,400+ lines of narrative fiction.
Original Chinese version: 坐庄之难（小说版） →