Chinese Police Have Seized $4.2 Billion Cryptos from PlusToken Ponzi Crackdown (theblockcrypto.com) 81
Crypto assets worth more than $4.2 billion have been seized by Chinese police during the massive PlusToken Ponzi scheme crackdown, according to a new court ruling. From a report: In a November 19 judgment made public on Thursday, the Jiangsu Yancheng Intermediate People's Court has detailed the breakdown for the first time of all the crypto assets seized by Chinese police related to the PlusToken case. A total of 194,775 BTC, 833,083 ETH, 1.4 million LTC, 27.6 million EOS, 74,167 DASH, 487 million XRP, 6 billion DOGE, 79,581 BCH, and 213,724 USDT have been seized by Chinese law enforcement from seven convicts during the crackdown. These assets, at today's prices, are worth over $4.2 billion in total. As part of the ruling, the court said "the seized digital currencies will be processed pursuant to laws and the proceeds and gains will be forfeited to the national treasury." However, the Yancheng Intermediate People's Court doesn't elaborate on how much of the seized crypto assets have been or will be "processed" or via what method exactly. The PlusToken criminal case was initially ruled on September 22 by a lower-level district court in the city of Yancheng in China's Jiangsu province.
The true face of crypto (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the true face of "crypto" - a sorry tale of manipulated prices and suckers being told it's an "investment" before being ripped off.
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Pretty much. The supply of idiots in the human race is endless though.
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These idiots are also a part of the problem with Democracy. When Communism is at its best, and that sure isn't a given, can it run circles around Democracy. Why? Because the people in a Democracy always first have to be convinced of the truth, purpose and the good of an idea, before they vote for it. By the time this happens can an authoritarian government like the CCP simply force everyone to it, and long before we have made up our minds (and that endless stream of idiots ...).
But I'm not too worried, sinc
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Has Communism _ever_ been at its best? The idea that it could work well if it were done correctly is sometimes called the "true Scotsman" fallacy.
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Meanwhile in the west: The democracies are voting for reality-show presidents.
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And yet, it _mostly_ works. That reality show president was legally elected, and is stepping down peacefully to be replaced by his elected opponent. That president faced impeachment, which failed but no shooting was involved.
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Communism/Capitalism and Democracy/Authoritarianism are orthogonal axes.
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> Because the people in a Democracy always first have to be convinced of the truth, purpose and the good of an idea, before they vote for it. By the time this happens can an authoritarian government like the CCP simply force everyone to it, and long before we have made up our minds (and that endless stream of idiots ...).
That is how private enterprises within a democracy are run. If you agree with that company, you can work there. If you don't, you can find another company.
Even the best of companies ma
Re: The true face of crypto (Score:3)
Well, duh, if you base a value on something imaginary and emotion based, you're gonna get something imaginary and emotion-based.
Our fiat currency only kinda halfway works because somebody is systematically manipulating it to keep it stable. (Not saying manipulating in a bad way.)
The essence of the thing is, that quality of work is so hard to determine, and hence, worth of a service or product is hard to determine. I mean actual measured physical quality. Like standardised properties, measured in standardize
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Well, that's somewhat true of regular currency too, isn't it? What makes a thing money is that everyone agrees that is money.
Regular currency works by manipulating peoples' perceptions of how much money is out there. There aren't enough physical dollars in the world to represent the entire supply of "US Dollars". What's more printing physical dollars has no effect at all on the money supply.
The way a central bank gets money into circulation is that they tell some big bank "You now have $1, but you have
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The value of a Fiat currency, the entire worth of the country that produces it, the land, the people, the resources, the productivity all back Fiat currency, it is worth what the country is worth.
The lesson here though, when you are running short of tax dollars, prosecute the rich, they could only get that way via corruption, every single time, so there will always be laws they have broken and confiscate their assets, debts gone.
It will become more popular, the old rich to wipe out the new rich to pay for
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This face you're seeing is however changing. It's ominous when a big government like the Chinese decides to shutdown crypto fraud and adds the spoils into its own treasury instead of simply destroying it. The Chinese government thereby has made a favour towards crypto currencies.
Of course it's also a favour towards any criminal using crypto currencies, but anything stabiling i.e. the Dollar also indirectly helps criminals.
I rather see it as an act by the Chinese government to clean up crypto currencies' ima
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This face you're seeing is however changing....
~Joe2020
Who's you?
Are you trying to reference the Silk Road bitcoin bust without mentioning it?
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/0... [cnbc.com]
There is a persistence (a characteristic shared by viruses) to interpret any event involving China as menacing.
A little like Randall Munroe's observation about obsessively correcting how someone is wrong on the Internet, any story on Slashdot about China attracts editorial assertions of...what is your wording? Something ominous?
Like an international version of the Overton Window,
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I don't know what your exact problem is, but you seem to have several here. First do you ask who "you" is when it should be obvious from the context that I was referring to the previous poster. How did this not even occur to you?
Then you run off and act like a Chinese government official defending Chinese policies on a western website, which has parallels to an atheist in a church pointing out that one shouldn't believe in God. It's a bit of a comedy frankly.
And excuse me when I point out to you that China'
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Yes, of course do we have a moral high ground. We get passed our mistakes and we make our moral high ground. You know that. You yourself have your moral high ground.
The Opium Wars then took place like 200 years ago. If they still have any meaning today, then why give Hong Kong back? This has nothing to do with it. Of course, it's because we believe in a better future that we do this.
And what a random argument it is. As if China was closing book stores and news stands because of the Opium Wars. These once we
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Iranian government isn't quite so progressive anymore. Gee...I wonder why.
I can tell you why. They're trying to build nuclear weapons and we don't let them. Gee... I wonder why we don't let them.
Nobody stole Hong Kong. Countries aren't simply lines on a map one owns. Hong Kong belongs to the people of Hong Kong and these people decide who they want to side with. Now we've decided we don't want to side with them any longer and allow for China to take back control. Hong Kong isn't happy about it, you know? But you act like they don't care at all, like they're fine either way. You m
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Who is the one saying crypto is an investment? Seems to be only the neck beards on slashdot telling me that. Makes about as much sense as investing in CAD or AUD.
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And this is the true face of a cynical first worlder with a comfortable life.
Processing (Score:3, Funny)
the Yancheng Intermediate People's Court doesn't elaborate on how much of the seized crypto assets have been or will be "processed" or via what method exactly.
They'll be reprinted as play money and returned to the boxes of Monopoly where they belong.
Re: Processing (Score:2)
Next to Dollars and Euros and Yen you mean?
Cause lets face it: Without a stabilizing regulatory body they'd be jumping up and down and being used for crimes just as much. Hell, they very often *are*.
More seriously how will they divest them? (Score:4, Interesting)
To recover the usuable worth of a cryptocurrecny one needs to be able to "spend" it. And that requires the credentials or access to a wallet containing the credentials.
If you had 4 billion in your wallet, would you make it easy to find the password? And if you were a (sophisticated) thief, would you not assume that someone would be trying to steal your wallet more than most people would? Especially if you were a gang-- then everyone around you is also a thief and know you have a wallet with Billions in it.
So How the heck did the chinese authorities get into the wallets? Did they use the craftsman wrench method of cracking crypto? Or did they manage to get an insider? Or some sort of computer hack?
All of that would be intriguing. Hope the story gets out.
It is odd however that they are saying it's going to the treasury and not say to repay the investors. Perhaps that's actually the point--- a punishment to dabling on crypto currency. Or perhaps a lot of the investors happen to belong to some out of favor groups of families. People like say investors in Ant who got too big for their nuv eau riche britches or some hong kong elites or falung gong? Foreign devils? If it's just ordinary Chinese folks they are trying to teach a lesson this might be not so good an idea.
Finally in any Ponzi scheme there's usually immediate talk of a clawback. The people who left early and intact can have their assets siezed to share the misery with the people who got left holding the bag. Often those folks are not just lucky but connected enough to know they needed to get out early, so it's not just luck.
Again no mention of this. COuld this be the reverse scenario-- govt people who knew about the police investigation using this info to tip certain people off for their own gain?
lots of interesting things are not being mentioned in this story.. If any of those speculations in either direction are true and come to light it could be a scandal that could shake the communist part structure. $4Billion means a lot of possible stake holders to be pissed off.
Another possibility too (Score:2)
Who's to say this was a ponzi scheme. The Chinese govt is about to roll out a nationally controlled crypto currency. It's imperative to stamp out any bootleg currency trading. What better way than to undermine confidence in the non-government exchanges by the double whammy of telling people they stole their money, and then also taking all the assets and not returning them. All that is needed is the accusation. No actual ponzi scheme need be taking place. One assumes that every bank has some regulatory
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So How the heck did the chinese authorities get into the wallets? Did they use the craftsman wrench method of cracking crypto? Or did they manage to get an insider? Or some sort of computer hack?
Clearly your Poly Si professor didn't tell you kids the down-side of communism. They are going to torture these criminals in unspeakable ways until the government officials have the cash in their pockets. Prisoners do not have any legal rights, and neither does anyone else. Only slightly worse than a representative democracy but still worse.
Poly crystaline silicon? (Score:2)
Clearly your Poly Si professor didn't tell you kids the down-side of communism.
I think my professors were carbon based.
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I mean, any major government can get access to any individual's passwords if they don't have a similar organization helping to secure them. That's not surprising.
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FTFY.
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Libertarians accept it as money, so *it is* money.
Is phenomenological positivism an oxymoron?
Re: Only Bitcoin matters! Gold vs Bitcoin (Score:2)
Gold is only good if you don't think about it too much.
If you actually think, you realize it's shit as well. It's not like it ever was stable either. It was just marketed as stable.
And used as a Ponzi-like scam scheme, just like the rest of the stock market (unintentionally, to be fair).
And essentially, apart from a couple of technical uses, it's almost worthless too. Only its partial rarity makes it more expensive, yet not too rare for actual use. (Otherwise I'd suggest anti-matter.)
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Gold is only good if you don't think about it too much.
If you actually think, you realize it's shit as well. It's not like it ever was stable either. It was just marketed as stable.
For some pretty unstable values of stable.
Posting AC to avoid burning mod points, but it's good to see someone in here that understands the bigger picture.
Welcome everyone to the truth!. Even investment schemes backed by something solid like gold, are just that - schemes. Gold has some use, but at base, it is just as arbitrary as Yap coins. Everything needs a selling/buying scheme.
But at least those are something real. Bitcoin is vapor. Even less than vapor.
And you are 100 percent on the Ponzi sch
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Welcome everyone to the truth!. Even investment schemes backed by something solid like gold, are just that - schemes.
It is ironic that people who "invest in gold" because it is a real physical thing (unlike T-bills, it seems) but do not take physical possession of the gold that they "own" are simply assuming it really exists, and that their assets recorded in electronic records are more real than other peoples assets recorded the same way. As with all other electronic wealth, it entirely depends on the honesty and solidity of the institution that holds the records. I will take a normal regulated bank or government securit
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Gold is only good if you don't think about it too much.
If you actually think, you realize it's shit as well. It's not like it ever was stable either. It was just marketed as stable.
Yep. You have to have a short, selective memory to perceive gold as a stable "store of value" [macrotrends.net].
It is ironic that the same sub-culture that sneers at national currencies as "fiat money" based on "nothing" (except that insubstantial thing called a national economy, the combined assets of that economy, and the national government) idolizes a metal as "real money" whose only asset is that is in limited supply and does not rust. And is doubly ironic that this same subculture idolizes a "currency" literally based
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40 of the years in the chart represent a period where currency was freely issued, but the price of gold legally fixed though most people couldn't access it at that price anyways. That system broke in 1970. And funny enough the chart begins in 1913, the year the federal reserve is formed and begins systematically increasing the money supply. Then you see the crash of 1920 as the supply is reigned in + diverted into stocks. None of it's really unexplained by Austrian monetary theory.
And you look at the subcu
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It was much more resistant to forgery, inflation, and arbitrage, though the willingness of banks and governments and anks to issue credit for gold they did not own was a long-standing danger. Terry Pratchett wrote a book titled "Making Money" that gave a startlingly good view of how cash and economies work, and of some of the risks. I recommend it highly for young engineers, perhaps even more than "Raising Steam".
Anti-matter, while incredibly valuable per gram, cannot be easily contained. The record right n
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It was just marketed as stable.
~BAReFO0t
The scarcity of Au, and other precious metals, minerals, and gems, never required marketing unless you are referring to jewels and guarded walls. Are you a thief or a joker? Because it appears you have confused history with economic theory and when, where, and how fiat economies evolved.
Wait... (Score:3)
... the government is keeping the scam money? Not returning it to its victims?
Sigh. #China
Re: Wait... (Score:2)
But that's what Dollars are for! ;)
Re: Wait... (Score:1)
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Just because one doesn't get arrested doesn't automatically make one a victim.
We don't take money off drug dealers and return it to the addicts either.
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The ULTIMATE Ponzi scheme... EVERYONE loses, except the government.
What will the CCP do with it? (Score:4, Informative)
"gains will be forfeited to the national treasury"
So it's not real value when others have it, but with the CCP in charge, it transforms into assets of value (just until they sell it)?
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Why do you think that? China does tolerate crypto currencies to some extend afaik.
This is about shutting down crime, and it's not much different from taking cash and money bills from criminals and to inject it back into the economy, because it isn't about the money, it's about how it was gained. The crime itself was a so called Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme and is a fraud.
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It will be sold to any fool who are willing to pay.
These aren't drugs or prohibited items, what's wrong will selling them if there are fools willing to pay for it?
Would you object if they seized some glass baubles and they managed to sell them at diamond's prices?
'k (Score:2)
You know... I'm not generally one of those shitheads who think that scam victims got what was coming to them, that it was some sort of Darwinian "tough love" for being stupid or at least ignorant of the probable financial consequences of what they were playing with. Life should not require that one stay ahead of ever more complicated chicanery.
But I'm vaguely inclined to make an exception for cryptocurrency scamming. *So much* of the market seems to be speculation and downright get-rich-quickery. I don't th
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Even if Bitcoin were sound money, far too many of the exchanges handling it are fraudulent and criminal by every reasonable standard. Are there _any_ exchanges that are acting honestly? The "Silk Road" was an iconic example of the criminal behavior, trading in heroin, extortion, and murder. Are the executives of _any_ Bitcoin exchange avoiding such directly criminal acts?
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Neither of them are actually money at this point. Until most of the volume is transactions for goods and services, rather than to/from other currencies they won't be money in the teleological sense.
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Greshem's law only kicks in when the two currencies are held in a fixed exchange ratio via government/bank policy. That is not the case w/ crypto currently.
"The proceeds and gains..." (Score:2)
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Pretty much any government has laws in place to confiscate the proceeds of a criminal enterprise upon arrest, and selling them off upon conviction.
Some, like the US, can confiscate the "illegal proceeds" without charges being filed, "arresting" the money and goods for being illegal, rather than the people caught holding them for doing something illegal. The people that had them must prove that nothing illegal was involved in obtaining them.
Money doesn't have civil rights.
In other news... (Score:2)
You didn't have to say "Ponzi". (Score:1)
For "Cryptos" is was already implied.
(Unless anybody knows a cryptocurrency based on physical resources that exist in fixed quantities, like spacetime, matterenergy an informationwork. No, wasting electricity does not count. Neither does gold. Nor fiat currencies.)
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To my mind, cryptos are even "worse" than fiat currencies in that they take something that has intrinsic value, electricity, and turn it into something that doesn't.
But you're absolutely right about the built in ponzi-ness of cryptos and people that defend cryptos by pointing to how much money they've made are ignoring the fact that ponzi schemes always start out with people making money and loads of it, that's how they get ever increasing numbers of suckers to buy in until one day there are no more new suc
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By your definition would any ordinary currency be a pyramid scheme, because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because those who own a lot of money can invest and win more back with it, and those who have little to begin with have got it harder.
And any ordinary currency can be used to buy piles of nonsense or utterly over-priced art. It doesn't give it more or less value just because you put ridiculous price tags on it. Value and worth is something we give to everything and isn't something. Money
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Value and worth is something we give to everything and isn't something.
~Joe2020
An ounce of wit is worth a pound of wisdom.
See Chris Rock's observation about the difference between wealth and rich.
I can generously interpret your comment, but they are often too conveniently abstract-- a kind of hedge. Assets, and what comprises them, is not an abstraction, but realities accrued and lost over time. Wealth is an evolution of accrued assets and its selfish advantage in a single generation is how idle it might remain. Sometimes more than a single generation.
I believe most rational peop
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By your definition would any ordinary currency be a pyramid scheme, because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Because those who own a lot of money can invest and win more back with it, and those who have little to begin with have got it harder.
Real investments grow or shrink in value based on factors external to the money invested, such as whether a product becomes popular and sells like mad or falls flat on its face.
Ponzi/pyramid schemes only (or largely) grow based on the influx of new capital from investors. And almost inherent in them is that the existing investors practice an almost religious devotion to defending and evangelizing to potential new investors because that's the way they get paid.
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also XPR is some system being trialed by banks for transfers
https://support.btcmarkets.net/hc/en-us/articles/360052947654-Cryptocurrencies-explained-What-is-XRP-
https://support.btcmarkets.net/hc/en-us/articles/360001879648-Power-Ledger-POWR-
Siezed? (Score:2)
Weakest Links (Score:1)
The leakiest wink that I perceive with this understanding is how "mining" is consti