151
Well that's awkward, but quite telling if you pay attention to the background details. It appears MicroStrategy holds more Bitcoin than all public companies combined, and that the Chinese government holds more Bitcoin than MicroStrategy.??
Believe it or not, this doesn't mean the Chinese government is an actual Bitcoin enthusiast tho, but that doesn't change the fact they have been hodling approximately of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. This means they have effectively outperformed MicroStrategy who just recently disclosed to own of all Bitcoins.
The hodler is in the details
Now let's look into the details of this revelation which are related to the Plustoken saga: "The Chinese government holds more Bitcoin than MicroStrategy after it seized 194,775 BTC during the infamous PlusToken scam....The PlusToken Ponzi scheme began in 2018, saying that it would offer monthly payments to users of its cryptocurrency wallet. Most of its users were based in China and South Korea....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. In total, the government has crypto assets worth over $5 billion."
Now that's interesting for numerous reasons. The Chinese government's crypto holdings have been confiscated from the Plustoken criminals way back in 2019/20 who stole the funds from mainly Chinese investors and the total assets actually comprise of more than the 1% of al Bitcoin. But what's more is that one year after their sentencing (to roughly 11 years in prison) China declared all crypto transactions as illegal, but that didn't stop Chinese citizens from doing so as this Helium article pointed out. The total number of victims who lost money in Plustoken are said to be 2 million but not all investors were Chinese as many were also Korean and some other nationalities, so we sadly can't draw some accurate statistical info from the details. But given that most were in fact Chinese still shows us how massive of a crypto market China has been and actually still is despite the ban.
Now, I tried getting more details on what Beijing is planning to do with all that crypto. The linked article speculates on the effects in case of a massive dump but also states there's no real indication that will happen, so ultimately no one really knows. It would be best of course if they tried to track and compensate as many investors as possible, but again there's no info on the government's plans on even Chinese media/social sources so I guess we just have to wait and see.
In conclusion
Bitcoin and private keys.
No really, I'm not going to repeat the whole thing after every scam and it's horrific details emerge, every now and then you'll get the abridged version. So to reemphasize: Bitcoin and private keys.
