From the Bitcoin robbery case in Sichuan, the two high courts should issue judicial interpretation on pricing issues

Recently, the Central District Court of Leshan City, Sichuan Province, sentenced a Bitcoin robbery case.

In October 2020, the defendant Liang was unable to repay his foreign debts, and he robbed the Bitcoin in the account of his friend's wife Luo Ling together with the defendants Wang You and Yuan. The three pretended to be fresh food delivery personnel, lured the victim to the parking lot, and took him to an open space. They used violence and threats to force the victim to log in to the "Huobi Exchange" APP account on his mobile phone, and then transferred 29.0004844 Bitcoins and 1258.04064 Ethereum in the account to their own accounts. The next day, Liang and Yuan failed to sell Bitcoin. So they called the police and surrendered.

In the end, the court found the three defendants guilty of robbery and sentenced them to fixed-term imprisonment ranging from seven years and six months to ten years, and imposed fines.

This verdict is very interesting, especially when it comes to price appraisal. The Leshan Price Certification Center determined that the stolen Bitcoins were worth RMB 2.6448 million, and the Ethereum was worth RMB 3.3431 million.

In the previous Plustoken case, the Yancheng Price Bureau had made an assessment of the corresponding legal currency for the virtual currency involved. When the verdict came out, Huo Xiaolu discussed with his friends that civil judgments avoided the issue of the price of virtual currency and legal currency, but criminal judgments openly and directly priced and assessed virtual currency. Isn’t this contradictory?

I remember that when I was still in the system, I experienced a case involving Ethereum. At that time, the industry did not have a deep study on the nature of virtual currency. There were many different opinions on whether it was a commodity, virtual property, data or something else. The public security, procuratorial and judicial organs were all very troubled. After holding many internal seminars, they finally believed that according to the regulatory documents, it could not be easily priced and disposed of.

Although this happened several years ago, it is undeniable that to this day, many criminal case handlers are still not familiar with the policies of the regulatory authorities and are not familiar with relevant civil cases. Coupled with the constant hype of online information, people instinctively believe that virtual currencies are of high value, especially mainstream currencies. Once a similar case occurs, it is usually directly considered as a property crime, and then the appraisal of the Price Bureau becomes a necessary process for handling the case.

To be honest, this trend must be taken seriously.

Regarding the value conversion of virtual currency and legal tender, civil judgments are relatively cautious. People in the industry generally agree that in civil judgments, the currency standard is more likely to be supported by the court, and the legal tender standard is taboo.

Two typical cases. One is a case of returning Bitcoin in Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court last year. In this case, the court made it clear that CoinMarketCap.com is not a virtual currency transaction price information publishing platform recognized by my country, and the Bitcoin transaction price data on this website cannot be directly used as a standard for determining losses. The other is a case of revoking an arbitration award in Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court. In this case, because the arbitration award directly referred to the closing price published on the okcoin.com website to convert the involved BTC and BCH into RMB, it was equivalent to supporting the exchange and transaction of Bitcoin and legal currency in disguise. The court determined that it violated the spirit of the policy document and finally revoked the above award.

Back to criminal cases, in fact, whether it is civil or criminal cases, we should respect the policy documents of the regulatory authorities and maintain basic unity. In the context of civil judgments cautiously avoiding the legal currency standard, criminal judgments have repeatedly directly priced virtual currencies, which is obviously inappropriate. It will also cause the public to have a chaotic understanding of the judiciary. We look forward to the two high courts issuing relevant judicial interpretations as soon as possible to standardize the handling of legal cases in the cryptocurrency circle.