编辑| Wu Blockchain本文经相关授权编辑引用。鼓励读者在亚马逊购买正版，支持慈善事业。 需要提前说明的是，本文是根据CZ个人回忆录《金钱自由》中的相关内容编写而成。作为第一人称的自我叙述文本，本书对他的成长、创业决策、监管冲突、监禁和动机解释的描述主要反映了作者自己的记忆和立场，不应直接视为完整的事实图景或独立的外部结论。本文的目的不是评价CZ，也不是以一种庆贺的方式呈现他的经历，而是根据现有的材料，梳理他在人生不同阶段形成的逻辑和世界观。你能携带的比你拥有的更重要。这个原则出现得很早，与创业关系不大。 CZ在江苏农村长大。三岁时，他随母亲搬到祖母家附近的中湖村。十岁时，他又举家搬到合肥。 1989年，他从商飞来
海到温哥华。他在书中写道，回顾过去，他似乎大约每四年搬一次家。他已经习惯了“拎着行李箱就走”，很快就适应了一个新的地方，甚至每隔几年就有一种换地方的冲动。在当时，这只是生活的一个事实。后来他才自觉地认识到，这种“随时准备离开”的心态影响了他的很多决定，包括商业上的决定。这不仅仅是一种模糊的性格描述。他接着写道，他养成了不积累东西的习惯。他不收集房子、汽车、艺术品或手表，因为“它们搬起来太麻烦，最终会成为一种负担”。这可不是有钱之后才采取的姿态。它来自混凝土前
Editor | Wu Blockchain
This article is edited and quoted with the relevant authorization. Readers are encouraged to purchase an authorized copy on Amazon and support charity.
It should be stated in advance that this article is compiled and written based on relevant content from CZ’s personal memoir Freedom of Money. As a first-person self-narrative text, the book’s accounts of his upbringing, entrepreneurial decisions, regulatory conflicts, imprisonment, and explanations of motive primarily reflect the author’s own memory and standpoint, and should not be taken directly as the full factual picture or as an independent external conclusion. The purpose of this article is not to evaluate CZ, nor to present his experiences in a celebratory way, but to sort through, on the basis of the available material, the logic and worldview he formed at different stages of his life.
What you can carry matters more than what you own
This principle appeared very early and had little to do with entrepreneurship. CZ grew up in rural Jiangsu. At age three, he moved with his mother to Zhonghu Village near his grandmother’s home; at ten, he moved again with his family to Hefei; and in 1989, he flew from Shanghai to Vancouver. In the book, he writes that looking back, he seemed to move roughly once every four years. He became used to the idea of “grabbing a suitcase and leaving,” settling into a new place quickly, and even feeling the urge to change places every few years. At the time, this was simply a fact of life. Only later did he consciously recognize that this “ready to leave at any time” mentality had influenced many of his decisions, including commercial ones.
This is not just a vague personality description. He goes on to write that he developed the habit of not accumulating things. He does not collect houses, cars, art, or watches, because “they are too troublesome to move and end up becoming a burden.” This was not a posture adopted after becoming wealthy. It came from the concrete experience of long-term relocation: from Zhonghu Village to Hefei, and then to Canada, the environment kept changing. What mattered was not assets fixed in one place, but whether he himself could still move, adapt, and rebuild order in a new environment.
This experience later became linked to his understanding of “freedom.” In childhood, relocation was simply a natural state. Later, after pleading guilty in the United States, serving time, and entering a halfway house, freedom became a concrete condition that could be taken away. In the foreword, he writes that in prison he could only use a computer with no internet access and no copy-paste function to write the first draft of the book. If he wanted to restructure a paragraph, he had to retype it. Freedom here was no longer an abstract word. It meant whether he could go online, whether he could move, whether he could decide his own time and actions. That is also why, in the latter half of the book, “time and freedom” are given much greater weight.
Money should be spent where it changes your trajectory
The book is detailed about the family’s early life in Canada. His father was pursuing a PhD and received a monthly school stipend of 1,000 Canadian dollars. His mother, unable to speak English well, found work at a garment factory on her third day in Canada and spent long days at a sewing machine earning minimum wage. On weekends, the family would drive an old car, carrying coupons his father had clipped from newspapers, and go store by store buying vegetables and meat. Eating out was rare. The family’s first restaurant meal came when his sister turned sixteen and they went to Chinatown for longevity noodles.
In such an environment, CZ’s understanding of money began with limits. He writes that he had no allowance and never really expected one. Once at Safeway, he saw a toy airplane priced at 1.99 Canadian dollars, cried and begged for it for a long time, and his father finally made an exception and bought it. It became the only toy of his youth. After that, he never asked for toys again, and later remained uninterested in expensive “toys.” This detail matters because it helps explain why he would later show little interest in luxury cars, collectibles, or high-end consumption. It was not that he first formed a doctrine and then rejected consumption. Rather, he had already learned in adolescence that most spending does not really change anything.
At the same time, the family made a different kind of choice elsewhere. His father spent 7,000 Canadian dollars on an x286 computer for him, equivalent to seven full months of income. Looking back, CZ does not present it as a sentimental sacrifice. He puts it plainly: it was the most expensive computer his father and he had ever bought, but “it was absolutely worth it; without that computer, there might not be a me today.” You can already see the stable hierarchy in his later thinking about money: ordinary consumption should be compressed, but spending that expands ability and changes one’s path can be substantial.
Show up first, and do not be the one who breaks your own momentum
During secondary school, CZ worked many jobs. At fourteen he went to McDonald’s. At fifteen, he washed dishes at the PNE amusement park during summer break. At sixteen, he worked the night shift at a gas station. He also became a certified volleyball referee and officiated school matches. Compared with simply earning money, the job that affected him more deeply in the book was refereeing. It did not interfere with school, and it was directly tied to the sport he loved. It was the first time he truly understood what it meant to say, “If you love your work, you never work a day in your life.” In the original context, this was not a motivational slogan. It described a very concrete work experience: when something brings income and also fits one’s abilities, interests, and rhythm, the sense of engagement and the sense of exhaustion are not the same.
Volleyball also gave him two other principles. The first was “show up.” During the summer before tenth grade, the UBC volleyball team ran a training camp. The fee was 90 Canadian dollars, which he could not afford, but he still went and sat in the stands watching. On the first afternoon, Coach Conrad noticed him, asked why he was not on court, heard his explanation, and then waved him down to join training. CZ writes that this was the moment he understood a life lesson he would only formulate later: showing up is 80 percent of success. The meaning behind the detail is straightforward. Many opportunities do not come to you after you have thought everything through outside the door. You have to enter the field first for things to start changing.
The second principle was “do not suddenly turn conservative in the middle of momentum.” In a key match near the end of tenth grade, his team was down 7–14. He scored eight straight points with jump serves and brought the score to 15–14. At match point, afraid of making an error, he switched to a safer standing serve. The serve itself was not a mistake, but the team still lost. After the match, Conrad asked him why he had not kept jump serving and then gave him two pieces of advice: always keep using the jump serve, and never interrupt your own momentum. CZ writes explicitly that he often used the second lesson later in both business and life.
Prices often make no sense; what you can do is keep delivering
Binance’s launch on July 14, 2017 is one of the book’s clearest high-pressure scenes. After the countdown ended, the BNB page was “full of sell orders, with no buy orders,” and the excitement in the office quickly turned into silence. Just hours earlier, people had been chasing BNB allocations. After launch, the chat room had already begun “greeting his ancestors.” CZ writes that he felt unprecedented pressure because “tens of thousands of people had invested because they trusted me, and now they were losing money.”
What matters more is how he interpreted the event. He did not focus on explanations such as “the market misunderstood us.” Instead, he wrote a line that later came to represent his view well: sometimes market movements make no sense at all and simply reflect emotion; good news can trigger a drop, and negative news can push prices higher. If that is the case, then the team’s next step is not to keep arguing in public opinion, but to keep moving the things they can move forward: API, zero-fee promotions, more than ten new coins, distributing GAS to NEO holders, v2 UI, ETH trading pairs, mobile, and nine language versions. At the same time, he insisted on going live every other day so the community could see that “I’m here, we’re here, and we’re building.”
When judging risk, the key question is whether you can come back
The book’s preface mentions that in 2014, when Bitcoin fell sharply, CZ had already sold his house and gone all in, and his personal assets dropped significantly. He Yi writes that what she saw then was a person who had already been hurt by his heavy position and yet was still standing on stage talking about blockchain technology, with more light in his eyes than at Bitcoin’s price peak. That description naturally carries the perspective of someone close to him, but at minimum it shows that by then, CZ had already treated high volatility as a cost that had to be borne rather than as a reason to leave.
At the end of the book, he looks back on that period and connects it to his own background. He writes that he came from an ordinary but academically inclined family, and that his technical background and Wall Street experience allowed him to understand Bitcoin’s value relatively early. He also says that “my age and financial position at the time enabled me to go all in on crypto at the critical moment.” This formulation points directly to how he judged risk: he did not look only at external volatility, but included his age, skills, professional experience, and family background in the model. If something was dangerous but he could still stand up again after failure, then in his eyes it was not unbearable risk.
That is also why his risk view is not simply the same as “loving risk.” More precisely, he tends first to ask whether he can recover, whether he can do it again. The repeated relocations, new environments, language adaptation, and work in his early years all trained that ability to recover. So when he later sold his house, changed industries, and started a company, those moves were not detached gambles without a base. They were closer to placing himself in a high-volatility zone while assuming he still had the ability to start over.
The first thing power must guard against is conflict of interest
A section of the book covering 2019 to 2021 illustrates his understanding of power particularly clearly. In 2019, Zhou Wei proposed doing proprietary trading, arguing that Binance had full access to market data and that trading would be easy. CZ rejected it immediately, saying directly that “an exchange doing its own trading for profit creates a conflict of interest.” The proposal was tried again in another form, with the claim that no private user data would be used and only public information would be relied on. He still refused and wrote, “I knew that once this door was opened, it could not be closed.” That sentence matters more than the first one. It shows that he was not only worried about a single trade, but about what happens when a boundary is breached and the organization begins to normalize it.
In 2021, the same sensitivity to boundaries appeared again in investment approval. The book says that one hour before an investment committee meeting, Zhou Wei revised the presentation materials and removed the information that the project’s main investor was Benjamin Rameau, because he knew that if CZ saw the name, he would probably veto the deal. As a result, CZ approved the investment without full information. Afterward, he regarded the incident as “crossing a line.” He does not spend pages discussing management theory. He simply lays out the event: information was deliberately removed, the boundary of decision-making was penetrated, and the problem lay not in whether the outcome was good or bad, but in the method itself.
Relationships must rest on incentive structure
In 2022, a “fairly successful” blockchain gaming company was hacked. Binance once considered leading a $150 million round to help ensure users would be compensated first. In an ordinary narrative, this could easily be presented as a story of industry solidarity. But during due diligence, CZ found that the project’s tokenomics tilted more heavily toward the founding team, with most of the upside going to founders and very little benefit for token holders. Binance proposed changes. The other side refused, and the investment was not made. Looking back a few years later, his judgment was simple: this put short-term money ahead of long-term returns; if the team had been willing to share benefits with users, the project might have performed better over the long run.
This passage shows clearly that his understanding of “relationships” is not built on personal affinity, reputation, or temporary alliance. It rests on incentive structure. Whether a project is truly on the users’ side is not determined by what is said at a conference, but by how value and tokens are allocated. Whether a partnership can last does not depend on emotional postures, but on who gets paid first, who bears the risk, and who gets pushed to the back of the line. That judgment later extended into his exchange-related narrative about “protecting users”: if user-first remains only a slogan, the structure will expose it sooner or later.
Family is a long-term support system
The parts of the book about his mother are very concrete. In Zhonghu Village, she prepared a desk for each of the two children. Because there was no kindergarten nearby, she found a way to get his sister into school early, and later let him enter primary school two years ahead at age five. In his recollection, “as long as it didn’t hurt himself or others, she never interfered,” giving him a great deal of freedom. In Canada, she went from being a teacher to working in a garment factory, leaving early and returning late for years. His sister took responsibility for cooking, and he washed dishes.
Taken together, these details suggest that family did not merely “support” CZ. It provided two practical things. The first was freedom: his mother did not overcontrol him, and he became used early to making and bearing his own choices. The second was long-term investment: under severe resource constraints, his parents still placed education, the computer, and the learning environment at high priority. That is also why, when he later started building Giggle Academy, the explanation he gave was not generic idealism, but something more specific: “I am a beneficiary of education. Education today lags behind. I can systematically make all subjects multilingual, so once they learn, they can find work. And if some of them benefit and later choose to give back to society, the mission can continue.” His view of education here is not abstract. It is directly connected to what happened in his own family early on.
After he went to prison, the family’s role took another form. The end of the book states clearly that prison life was hard, but it did not break him, and his family remained steadfast in support. In that sense, family is not just emotional comfort in his narrative. It functions more like a long-term support system: providing education and freedom in the early stage, and absorbing emotional and structural pressure in the later stage.
Contain the consequences first, then talk about the personal cost
The foreword and preface offer two angles on the period after 2023. In the preface, CZ describes it directly: he voluntarily flew to the United States, admitted to violating relevant provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act, was sentenced to four months in prison, served his term, and was pardoned a year later. In the foreword, He Yi adds another internal perspective: he said in an online meeting that if he did not go, the Biden administration would “kill Binance,” BNB holders would suffer seriously, and the industry might be set back ten years. Therefore, he decided to bear it himself and let this “six-year-old baby” continue walking on its own.
Whatever outside observers may think of that framing, the book at least shows a clear shift: earlier in life, the risks he faced were mainly personal ones involving going all in and enduring volatility. Later, his risk assessment clearly included the organization, users, regulators, and the broader industry environment. In other words, it was not that he stopped emphasizing the individual, but that he placed the individual within a much larger chain of consequences. In the book, flying to the US, pleading guilty, and going to prison are not narrated primarily around personal grievance. They are framed more around “what would happen if this were not done.” This way of handling things is actually continuous with his reaction on Binance’s launch day in 2017: when pressure arrives, first think about how to contain the consequences, then think about how to bear it personally. The difference is that in the earlier case he could still respond by shipping product, while in the later one he was already in a structural conflict with institutions and could only exchange personal freedom for organizational room.
If you still can, then keep going
The final part of the book is not especially sentimental. CZ writes that he came from an ordinary family, benefited from education, understood Bitcoin relatively early thanks to his technical and Wall Street background, went all in at a critical moment, then later experienced downturns and prison, but still had family support and a company that continued to develop. He then writes that what matters most to him now is that he has regained time and freedom, and still “has resources, influence,” and “the ability to continue doing more for the world.” He finally condenses it into one sentence: “If you can, you must.”
If read in light of the entire book, that sentence does not appear out of nowhere. It has been built up all along: in childhood, watching a hand pump and electric light and feeling that technology could change life; in adolescence, using volleyball and work to understand “showing up,” sustained effort, and boundaries; after founding Binance, returning to delivery when prices spun out of control; in management, guarding against conflict of interest; in relationships, looking to incentive structure; and finally, after losing freedom, re-evaluating the value of time and the ability to act. In that sense, the closing line reads less like a slogan than like a compression of all the experiences before it: when a person still has ability, resources, time, and room to act, then stopping at reflection is not enough; the next step is to continue doing the work.
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