In 2013, when he returned home to visit relatives, Adong, in that crumbling tiled house, pointed at the characters flickering on the screen and said to me, "This is the digital gold of the future. It has
no center; no one can control it."
In my memory, the air of two places is indelible. One is the dry, hard air of my hometown, a small county in Henan, mixed with the smell of coal smoke and dust—that is the undertone called "lowliness." The other is the smell of old paper mixed with preservative in Yifu Building at China University of Political Science and Law, at the foot of Jundu Mountain in Changping, Beijing—that is the illusion called "the rule of law." In the winter of 2013, wind and sand raged over Beijing. I hunched my neck in the library, memorizing the General Principles of Criminal Law, fantasizing that the law could be a scalpel to cut out the tumors of society. And that year, Adong, my distant cousin, was sitting in a smoke-filled café in Zhongguancun, his eyes shining with a religious fervor I could not understand at all at the time. That was the montage of our fates. I walked into the temple of order; he crashed into the wasteland of desire.
A Zhongguancun Café and Yifu Building at CUPL in 2013
Adong is five years older than me; by generational ranking I have to call him elder brother. In the eyes of the people back home, Adong was a "freak." He did not work, did not sit the civil service exam, and spent all day in front of several roaring computers, saying he was "mining." "Ahui, this thing is called Bitcoin." In 2013, when he returned home to visit relatives, Adong, in that crumbling tiled house, pointed at the characters flickering on the screen and said to me, "This is the digital gold of the future. It has no center; no one can control it." At that time, one Bitcoin was worth only a few hundred yuan. Looking at his bloodshot eyes, I wondered whether he had joined a pyramid scheme. I urged him to find a proper job. He gave a chuckle: "Future Lawyer Lü, you don't understand. The law protects the old order, while we want to build a new world." Back in Beijing, I burrowed into Yifu Building. In class, the teacher talked about the principle of legality and the theory of expected possibility. And Adong, at Garage Café in Zhongguancun, became one of the first "over-the-counter traders." OTC at that time was as pure as a blank sheet of paper: WeChat had not yet fully conquered the social arena, so people would shout in QQ groups, you transfer money, I send coins, all relying on a simple heroism and technological faith.Adong keenly smelled that gap—the liquidity between fiat currency and digital currency.At the end of 2013, the People's Bank of China and four other ministries issued an announcement defining Bitcoin as a "virtual commodity." Adong was not afraid; he was even more excited: "You see, the regulators recognize its value; they just do not let banks touch it. This shows that the spring of intermediaries has come."”
2017: A Turning Point of Fate and a Cold Announcement
2017 was the darkest moment of my life. Having failed to gain admission to Peking University Law School for graduate study, I wandered the basements of Beijing like a stray dog. At that time I was desperately poor and wanted to make some "quick money." Just days before I was nearly dragged by an old classmate into an ICO (initial coin offering),the "9.4" announcement of 2017 arrived without warning.Six ministries and commissions jointly issued a document characterizing ICOs as illegal public fundraising and shutting down all domestic exchanges. That night, the crypto community was filled with cries of despair. I too was pulled back from the edge of the cliff. And Adong disappeared that night. Half a month later, he sent me a message from Singapore: "Ahui, I'm going overseas. The door at home has closed, but the windows around the world are still open."The shutdown of exchanges turned OTC from an "auxiliary tool" into the "only channel."Adong went to Huobi and became a top-tier OTC merchant. He was no longer the greenhorn drinking coffee in Zhongguancun; he had become a guest of the "market makers." He kept dozens of people under him, building a vast currency exchange empire across Southeast Asia, Dubai, and Georgia. In a video he showed me the sunset in Dubai, and he said: "Ahui, money here isn't money, it's numbers. As long as human desire exists, my business will never fall." At that moment, sitting at my narrow desk at the law firm, looking at the low-level crimes in the case files—people killing and burning over a few thousand yuan—I suddenly felt that Adong's world was very far from mine. But I knew,in this industry, once the speed of wealth accumulation exceeds the capacity of cognition to bear it, collapse is only a matter of time.
The Essence of Violence: High Turnover and Risk Transfer
Many people ask me, how exactly do OTC merchants make money? Adong once revealed the "bible" of this trade to me after a few drinks.OTC doesn't make money from coin price fluctuations; that's the logic of retail investors. The merchant's logic is "turnover rate" and "information asymmetry."In this gray-market chain, funds are the lifeblood. With CNY 1 million in capital, if it can be turned over 10 times a day, even at a premium of only 0.5% each time, the daily profit is CNY 50,000.“Ahui, our esteemed Lawyer Lü, do you think what we do is the kind of business those people you visit in the detention center every day are engaged in? I tell you, what we pursue is extreme velocity, extreme high turnover, but we will not break the law.”Adong said with a touch of mockery. But high turnover means having to connect with a large number of funding sources. When illicit funds from telecom fraud, online gambling, and money laundered out through irregular emigration channels pour frantically into this market, Adong’s OTC channel becomes a natural money-laundering conduit. According to the evidence I later saw in the case file, Adong’s business underwent a complete transformation after 2019. He began to connect with so-called “illegal payment-settlement schemes.”Illegal payment-settlement schemes involve using the bank cards of tens of thousands of ordinary people to break up illicit money and, through OTC transactions, convert U (USDT) into clean fiat currency.Adong knew full well that the money was not clean. But he had a morbid sense of luck: he felt he was merely providing an “exchange tool,” like a person who sells kitchen knives, regardless of whether the buyer uses them to chop vegetables or to attack people. For the sake of scale, he even began to “transfer risk.” He had the salespeople under him buy cards and rent cards. Before the “Operation Card Break” campaign, a set of four bank-card items cost only CNY 800–1,000; by 2024, the cost of renting a card had soared to CNY 8,000–12,000 per day. This surge in cost was in fact a harbinger of death.
Collapse: Operation Card Break and the Alienation of Human Nature in the Face of Money
In October 2020, “Operation Card Break” swept across the country. Cracks began to appear in Adong’s empire. The card farmers under him (people who provide bank cards) were arrested in batches. Every morning when he woke up, the first thing he did was check the “loss reports” in the group chat. Today CNY 5 million was frozen; tomorrow 10 cards were blocked. Adong’s psychological state became completely distorted during that period. He began to smoke frantically and suffered from insomnia night after night. He looked at the tens of millions in fluctuating balance in his account, yet found that he seemed to be guarding a pile of hell money.He wanted to stop, but this trade was like a centrifuge out of control: once you enter the core circumference, you can never jump out again.“The money of those gamblers, the retirement savings of those old men and women, all passed through my account.” Adong later told me during a meeting, “Ahui, sometimes I feel that my palms are sticky and cannot be washed clean.” But he still lost himself in greed. To make up for the shortfall, he began to take on some “high-risk” orders, that is, so-called “forcing a breakthrough even when knowing full well it is illicit money.” The premium was too high, high enough to make a person forget that he was enjoying freedom.
Legal Contest: The Gaze Behind High Walls and the Boundaries of Law
In early 2021, Adong was taken away at the airport while returning to China to handle family matters. I became his defense lawyer. In the meeting room of the detention center, across that cold and blurry acrylic panel, I saw the once arrogant “big boss.” He was wearing a yellow vest, his hair shaved to stubble, and his whole person was like a piece of dead wood drained of moisture. “Ahui, save me.” The first sentence he spoke, his voice was trembling. I opened that thick stack of case files. The public prosecution organ charged him with three offenses:the crime of illegal business operations, the crime of assisting information network criminal activities, and the crime of concealing or disguising criminal proceeds.In the OTC world, this is known as the “Sword of Damocles.”The most critical point of dispute lies in “subjective knowledge.”The chat records the prosecutor produced showed that A Dong used Telegram and other encrypted software in the transactions, required downstream buyers to make frequent small-amount transfers late at night, and the prices were far above the average market price. “As a seasoned practitioner, could you not know that this does not conform to normal commercial logic?” the prosecutor asked.In the eyes of legal professionals, this “abnormality” is “knowledge.”The law does not look at what you say verbally; it looks only at the state of mind inferred from your objective conduct. I conducted a defense in court lasting three hours. I argued that A Dong’s conduct was in essence a “risk-management deficiency” of a professional OTC merchant, rather than a subjective “criminal conspiracy.” By comparing typical cases published by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, I sought to prove that in some of the transactions A Dong did not reach the degree of intent required for the crime of concealing or disguising criminal proceeds. That was an extremely difficult contest. Every cross-examination was like dancing on the edge of a knife.
VI. The End: Snow Outside the High Walls and the Afterglow of Human Nature
On the day the judgment was handed down, a heavy snow fell in Beijing. In the end, A Dong was not found to have engaged in illegal business operations, nor was he given the maximum sentence for the crime of concealing or disguising criminal proceeds. Because I insisted on a tiered defense regarding the degree of “subjective knowledge,” and because he truthfully confessed and actively cooperated in recovering part of the illicit funds involved in the case, the court ultimately convicted him on the concurrence of the crime of assisting information network criminal activities and the crime of concealing or disguising criminal proceeds, and the sentence was not too long. On the day of sentencing, I saw him let out a long breath. There was in his eyes, remarkably, a sense of release as if he had been reborn. On New Year’s Day 2025, I went to pick him up upon his release. At the moment he walked out of the gate, the sunlight made him squint. Looking at the crowds of people scanning QR codes to pay all over the street, and at the young people hurriedly passing by on shared bicycles, he suddenly squatted down by the roadside and burst into tears. “A Hui, over these ten years, what have I actually left behind?” From a Zhongguancun geek in 2013 carrying a “technological dream” to a weathered former prisoner in 2025, A Dong, with his prime twelve years, taught me the most profound lesson in legal theory. In this world of gray-market industries, there has never been any myth, only the dregs swallowed by desire.
Lawyer Lü talks about OTC. In the eyes of many, this term means sudden wealth and crossing class boundaries. But in my view, it is a mirror that reveals demons. It reveals the gaps in the financial system, and it also reveals the greed at the very bottom of human nature. Many people think that the law lags behind and that code is ahead of its time. As long as my technical logic forms a closed loop, the rules of the real world cannot touch me. But they forget that,the law is not only provisions; it is also the baseline of the social contract. When, for the sake of that bit of premium, you choose to ignore the blood and tears behind the funds, you have already handed yourself over to criminal law.A Dong was lucky; he still has a chance to come out and start over. But more “A Dongs” may spend the rest of their lives inside that high wall built by desire. In this Web3 era, innovation is the engine, but the law is the braking system. A car without a braking system—the faster it drives, the more tragically it crashes. Criminal law is the magna carta of the offender; I can only help you obtain a correct legal assessment, and everything inside and outside the high walls is determined solely by the facts of your case. This article is purely fictional; any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
