There is an old saying in the crypto circle: the dividends only come once, and if you miss it, there's basically no chance. Most latecomers end up becoming bagholders in the end.

Look at the airdrop wave from 2020 to 2023, projects like DYDX, ARB—early participants who grabbed tokens casually made huge profits, some earning hundreds of millions. But once the hype passed, the entry barriers for newcomers shot up, requiring complex interactions and gas fees, resulting in wasted effort. Early birds got the meat, while latecomers didn't even get the soup.

The inscription craze is the same story. Those who started with ORDI, SATS in 2023 threw in a few thousand dollars and turned it into millions. But retail investors who jumped in to buy inscription tokens at the end of the year? They just bought on the secondary market and most lost everything.

When the AI sector first appeared, nobody believed in it, didn't even want to look. But WLD kept rising, attracting retail investors to buy wildly, only to be trapped for two years.

At the start of 2024's Memecoin craze, various meme coins on-chain were creating thousandfold myths every day—hundreds of dollars could turn into millions, a real dream of getting rich. Now? The market cap of on-chain meme coins is shrinking, new tokens often go to zero immediately, and exit scams come one after another.

So here’s the question: why do some people always make money while others always lose?

Veteran investors are often held back by psychological anchors—fear of high prices, fear of drops, hesitating and missing the best entry points. Conversely, newcomers who know nothing and fear nothing, daring to go all-in on hot trends, tend to profit the most.

Making big money in crypto boils down to one word: the first wave. If your perception is a half step slow and your actions are also delayed, you’ll miss out on the dividends.