When Bitcoin plummeted 30% in the early morning, Li Ming was drinking his third cup of coffee.

His phone started vibrating, seven messages in a row, all from the same name: Zhao Jianguo. This retired steel mill accountant had exchanged his lifelong savings of 420,000 USDT and fully committed to his “Principal Protection Follow Order$BTC ‌$ETH ‌$SOL ‌” strategy.

“Manager Li! The market crashed!”
“Are our contracts still protected?”
“Manager Li, are you there?”

Li Ming didn’t reply. He switched to the background, watching his self-developed “On-Time Payment” algorithm automatically activate. At the first sign of market volatility breaching the threshold, the system froze Zhao Jianguo’s account and began executing the payout calculations.

He’s not a scammer. At least, not at this moment.

His peers all laughed at his naivety. “Principal protection contract? Still need to pay out? Don’t you know what the crypto market is like?” But Li Ming insisted on writing that line of code: when a follower’s loss exceeds 15%, automatically transfer funds from his margin pool to cover the difference.

Now, his margin pool was shrinking at a visibly rapid rate. One by one, payout requests from all thirteen follower accounts flickered in the queue. Zhao Jianguo’s was at the front, needing a payout of 190,000.

Outside the window, Shanghai was drizzling with freezing rain. Li Ming’s hand hovered over the mouse; with a right-click, he could terminate this automatic payout process—there was indeed a gray area in the contract, a clause allowing suspension in extreme systemic risk scenarios. He had written that line, naturally knowing how to trigger it.

The eighth message from Zhao Jianguo arrived: “Manager Li, I don’t want to make money, just want to keep my principal to pay for my kid’s down payment…”

Li Ming looked at the timestamp flickering on the screen: 04:17. In an hour, Zhao Jianguo would wake up, just like the past three months, first making porridge for his wife, then opening his mobile app to check his account. What would he see today?

The algorithm reached its final step. A pop-up appeared: “Confirm transfer of 190,000 USDT to account ZHAO_1949? This operation is irreversible.”

Li Ming lit a cigarette, the smoke swirling in front of the screen. He thought of his father, also an accountant, who had entrusted his lifelong savings to some “Principal-Protected Financial Product,” only to lose everything in that stock market crash. He remembered how his father stared blankly at the empty passbook for twenty years.

When the cigarette burned to the end, he snuffed it out and clicked confirm.

Almost simultaneously, Zhao Jianguo’s message came again: “Manager Li, I just checked my account… there’s an extra 190,000? What’s this?”

Li Ming finally typed a reply: “Teacher Zhao, this is the guaranteed minimum payout as per the contract. Your principal of 420,000 remains intact and undamaged. Please check.”

He switched back to his main account. After the payout, the remaining balance was less than 50,000. But he then did something that even the monitoring system flickered warnings for: manually transferred another 5,000 to Zhao Jianguo’s account.

His phone vibrated again, and Zhao Jianguo sent a string of tearful emojis: “Manager Li, what’s this extra five thousand?”

“Interest,” Li Ming replied, “though it’s not in the contract.”

He turned off his computer; it was still dark outside. The last glow from the screen reflected his exhausted face. His peers would laugh at him for going crazy, but he knew that after being in this industry for a long time, you have to believe in something—even if it’s just believing in the “On-Time Payment” code he wrote himself.

The freezing rain outside had stopped somewhere along the way. When the first rays of dawn broke in, Li Ming thought maybe today he should give his father a call.