Where did China’s 190,000 Bitcoins go?

In our encryption industry, there has been a widely circulated saying that governments of various countries have long held Bitcoin, with the US government holding 215,000 Bitcoins and the Chinese government holding 190,000 Bitcoins.

The source of this statement is the "PlusToken" case, the largest case in the crypto industry that year.

In 2018, the PlustToken platform quietly spread in the cryptocurrency circle. The platform packaged itself as digital currency financial management and lured millions of people to participate with high interest rates.

According to Beijing Daily, in early 2019, the Yancheng Public Security Bureau set up a special task force to investigate the "Plus Token" platform.

In March 2020, the Ministry of Public Security deployed public security organs across the country to arrest all 82 core members suspected of pyramid schemes.

In this case, the public security organs seized a total of 190,000 bitcoins, more than 27.24 million EOS coins, 830,000 Ethereum coins, etc. This case involved a total of 9 digital currencies including Dogecoin, Bitcoin, Dash, and Tether.

A criminal lawyer said that after a platform is identified as a pyramid scheme, generally only the organizers and leaders are held criminally responsible, which constitutes the crime of organizing and leading pyramid schemes. In judicial practice, other participants are generally not identified as criminal victims.

Therefore, after the relevant illegal gains are recovered, they will be confiscated according to law and turned over to the state treasury.

According to relevant media reports, this batch of digital currency assets is worth US$4.2 billion.

The 190,000 bitcoins confiscated in this case are the source of the claim that the Chinese government holds 190,000 bitcoins.

This batch of bitcoins is worth 12.7 billion U.S. dollars today, calculated at 67,000 U.S. dollars per bitcoin!

But if you think that these 190,000 bitcoins will be held until today, it may be too naive.

Since the beginning of 2020, Yancheng City's fines and confiscations have been topping the list. A reporter once called the relevant office of the Yancheng Finance Bureau to inquire about the reasons for the significant increase in fines and confiscations.

Relevant staff members said, "The proportion of traffic fines is now very small. It is mainly because we have cracked major economic cases, such as fraud, so the public security has more fines and confiscations."

In addition, Wu Blockchain said that after communicating with many OTC merchants, it was determined that a large part of the coins involved in the Token Plus case were sold during the period of BTC $7000-$12000 from the end of 2019 to the middle of 2020. The "funds and income obtained shall be confiscated according to law and turned over to the state treasury" in the judgment also confirms this statement to some extent.

There are also big Vs who, after address tracking and analysis at the end of 2020, believe that there seem to be 15,000 BTC that have not been sold, and the addresses of 830,000 Ethereum have not changed.

If this is the case, the approximate market value of the undisposed digital currency is more than 3 billion US dollars, which is equivalent to the value of 23.7 billion yuan announced by Yancheng at the end of 2023.

If Yancheng really disposed of that batch of tokens, then there really aren’t many left now. . .