jakiro
Source: Lawyer Liu Honglin
Only by walking through the vastness can you know the insignificance of a person.Only by wandering through history can you know the shortness of life.Walking and reverie will help us clear out things outside our bodies and discover how small we are.Knowing the truth is not easy to be in hand, so you no longer have to make things worse.If you know that all things have spirits, you will no longer be the only one.
This is the beginning of director Jia Zhangke’s book “Jia Xiang” written in Dunhuang in the wind and sand.
Starting from Linfen, Shanxi, to Dunhuang, nearly 2,000 kilometers away, the journey is long.My bedtime reading comes from this native native of Fenyang, Shanxi.Reading his life starting from Fenyang, those memories revolving around video halls, cassettes, and county art troupes, he said that the county town is the most real and profound part of Chinese society. That is his starting point and the shot of his observation of China.
Therefore, Jia Zhangke never could not avoid the county town when making movies.His movies do not shoot skyscrapers, but people from Linfen, Fenyang, and Taiyuan.In the documentary “Fenyang Boy Jia Zhangke”, he recalled that when the teacher asked the whole class to watch “Dong Cunrui”, the female class monitor cried and everyone had to learn from her.At that time, he didn’t know that “expression” could become a profession, but the times changed too quickly and the reality was even more drastic than the script.What he did was just to use a county town as a viewfinder to reshoot the out-of-focus shots of China’s change.
County towns are the middle state of China, neither rural areas in the traditional sense nor cities in the first-tier sense.You can see government buildings, department stores, wedding companies that are well-decorated, as well as tricycles beside the vegetable market, telephone poles full of “certificate application advertisements” and elderly people wearing flowery cotton jackets.The county town has the atmosphere of a commercial society and the stickiness of human relationships; it has modern skin and the skeleton of a traditional society.It is the most realistic mixed reality in China.
But in this reality, the Bitcoin we know hardly exists.
In cafes in Shanghai and Shenzhen, people discuss that Bitcoin is a technological revolution and a global value network; you can hear entrepreneurs talking about RWA, L2 expansion, DAO governance, on-chain liquidation; Web3 conference, Hong Kong license plate, Singapore compliance, Token economy… It seems that we are witnessing a wave that is about to replace the old world.But once you enter the county town, the reality of virtual currency is a completely different story.
A friend who works as a lawyer in a county town told me that he has received many cases related to “virtual currency” in recent years, almost all of which occurred in prefecture-level cities and counties in the northwest or central regions.He mentioned a real case: a young man in a small town relied on his “side job” on WeChat to help people collect USDT for RMB, earning dozens of yuan per transaction fee.He is in his early twenties, has not studied much, and has never been exposed to any financial knowledge.He felt that the threshold for this “side job” was low and the risk was small. There were a few WeChat, a card, and a few hundred yuan handling fees, “just helping people change coins, not cheating anyone.” It was not until the police came to him that he realized that he was a funding channel on the fraud chain.When facing the judge’s question, he couldn’t even explain clearly “where the funds come from and where they are transferred.”
This story is not an exception.The “bitcoin” in the county is not a decentralized dream, but an indissoluble solution to account freezing, fund risk control, fraud-related accusations and inability to handle the case.There is no need for USDT cross-border settlement, no entrance to the Web3 ecosystem, and no KOL explanation of cold wallets and MetaMask.The first time people hear about “virtual currency” is often because who is cheated, who joins the group and cannot withdraw, and whoever transfers his money will never come back.
Over time, the impression of virtual currency by people in the county is not about technology or the future, but about two words: “scammer”.
This has also formed a visible break: the virtual currency within the Fifth Ring Road is a speech on entrepreneurship financing, policy observation, and the terminology of the Web3 summit discussing compliance, stablecoins, Payfi, and tokenization; the virtual currency outside the Fifth Ring Road is account freezing, exiting the group and running away, public security notices and court cases, which is a realistic conversation “Do you know the fellow villager who makes money?”
The county town does not lack smartphones or information channels, but what it lacks is the trust basis and usage scenarios for understanding these technologies.Here, Bitcoin is not “digital gold”, but “high-risk synonyms”; you say Ethereum is an asset issuance platform, which sounds like some kind of scam code here; you say Web3 is an ideal governance method for decentralization, and what may appear in other people’s minds is a “pig killing disk”.
In the information dissemination system, this misunderstanding will only be amplified.In the circle of friends in big cities, what you see is who completed the Pre-A round, which project has been listed on the homepage of TechCrunch, and who gave a speech on the story of “global asset circulation” in Singapore; and in the WeChat group in the county, what is circulated is the painful experience sharing of “a female college student was cheated of 600,000 yuan in currency speculation”, “a local police reminded not to participate in virtual currency transactions”, and “the bank card can’t be freeze for three months”
The county is not behind, it just lives in another order.In this context, it is difficult to explain Bitcoin and Web3 clearly, even if it does have technical content, it does have global potential.But reality will not automatically give you positive cognition just because you have the technology.
This is also why, when we discuss compliance paths, infrastructure construction, and the global settlement capabilities of stablecoins in the industry, we must admit that this industry is “operated in layers” in China.Inside and outside the Fifth Ring Road, there are two financial languages, two information systems, two risk perceptions, and two living orders.People in the county are never outsiders, but they are often the “last person to be told”.
It’s not that Bitcoin cannot enter the county town, but that we have not found a proper way to tell it.Faced with grassroots civil servants who are tired of dealing with cases of “USDT money laundering” or “e-fraud channel”, it seems far and powerless to talk about what the token economic model is; and for those families who have lost enough money in the market, no matter how advanced the technology is, it is difficult to get the second trust.
But sometimes we also need to think from the perspective of others: for many grassroots law enforcement officers, they are not against technology, but do not have the extra energy to understand it.The cases handled daily have already made them exhausted – telegram fraud, money laundering, cross-border funds, and account freezing, and each line involves the losses of countless families behind them.They cannot see the future of “blockchain technology”, but only see the reality that “on-chain funds” make people bankrupt.It’s not that they don’t want to understand, but the reality doesn’t give them time to understand.
It is also difficult for ordinary county residents to distinguish which fraud disguises are from marketing rhetoric.For most county users, there are almost no judgment tools for the difference between stablecoins and pyramid scheme coins, the boundaries between platform coins and points, and the distance between on-chain projects and funding plates.This lack of “financial reading ability” is the deep-seated reason why scams have succeeded repeatedly.When you see someone around you being deceived, you will naturally label the entire industry.
If technology wants to truly enter life, it must first learn to say what life is.The county town is not a marginal area, but a real context that we have not yet had serious conversations.It’s not to adapt it to our vocabulary, but we should try to understand the language there as well.Perhaps the story of Bitcoin, in addition to being told in Web3 conferences and financing news, should also happen in more common places.
The wave of technology will come after all, but what it needs to pass through is not only the wind and sand of the loess, but also misunderstanding, vigilance and silence.
