Hot Articles | Justin Sun: There is no long-termism in China's Internet

On July 28, Sun Yuchen, founder of TRON, posted an article on Weibo titled "There is no long-termism in the Chinese Internet", which was widely circulated in the community. The following is the full text of the article.

There is no long-termism in the Internet industry in China. The life cycle of the Internet is short. Coupled with the limitations of national conditions, valuable things can be destroyed at any time. Even good companies and good businesses are rare to survive for more than ten years.

China's globalization is a kind of reverse colonialism. Colonialism was all about shipping earned capital and primitive accumulation from colonies around the world back to the motherland. China's globalization is the first time in history that China has treated its own motherland as a colony. Few Chinese entrepreneurs keep their primitive accumulation of capital in their motherland. Basically, they transfer it to all parts of the world as soon as they get the chance, as long as it's out of China, anywhere is fine.

Ten years is a cycle that is difficult for Chinese people to understand, because the future of two or three years is completely uncertain. Whether it is officialdom, agriculture, industry, education, or business, the collapse of a banquet building is almost a daily news in China. You have to become famous immediately, make money immediately, and succeed immediately. If a project takes ten years to succeed, I am afraid that no investor in China would be willing to invest.

It is difficult for Chinese people to understand common law. Why something can be done or not is because of the leadership/unit/official document/regulation/law, not because we have always done it this way and it is customary. A country that emphasizes ancient times actually has no ancient history. The country with the longest history actually has no history. So what can be illegal today can be legal tomorrow and illegal again the day after tomorrow.

If a person is so impatient and unstable, lacking in long-termism, then his/her original family must be unfortunate, lacking sufficient sense of security, unstable, and cruel. It is like a dark forest, where the entire environment lacks trust and is full of calculations and winners and losers.

What if a community of more than a billion people is like this?

Buddhism talks about the afterlife, and those who believe that humans need to practice for several lifetimes to achieve perfection rarely kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. I think that if people believe in the afterlife, or even reincarnation, their hearts must be extremely perfect and peaceful. But in today's Chinese society, which is no different from a dark forest, I'm afraid few people believe this.

In this environment, anyone who is still working on a platform/protocol is respectable. Because the true meaning of a platform/protocol is a set of trust rules, and everyone can prosper in the platform/protocol for a long time. On the contrary, in the cryptocurrency world that everyone believes is full of short-term speculation, the number of people working on protocols is the largest.

The Three-Body Problem describes the Trisolarans like this. Their galaxy has three suns, which are moody and have no regular motion (scientifically proven that there is no stable solution for the Three-Body motion). Today's brilliant civilization will be destroyed tomorrow. Such a dark work can only be written by authors with a mainland background. Only those who have survived in a dark forest with an extreme lack of security can understand the dark forest.

In the future when the overall geopolitical environment is becoming more turbulent, China has no long-termism. However, when I first came into contact with Buffett's long-termism, I envied the long-termists from the bottom of my heart, who developed an optimism and tranquility about time, years, and the future in an environment full of trust, goodwill, and benign competition.

Maybe this is what I long for but can't get.