Take the pill of the Communist Party

PANews reported on December 18 that, according to the WeChat official account of Lawyer Wu Enxiang's team, a public security bureau in a certain region of the country declared the act of trading Bitcoin through a VPN as illegal, based on the 'bypassing the Great Firewall and trading cryptocurrency' case. In the case, an individual named Zhang used a VPN to access foreign trading platforms and made a profit of 90,000 yuan from virtual currency transactions. According to the 'Interim Regulations on the Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks' and the 'Public Security Administration Punishment Law,' the public security bureau confiscated his illegal gains of 90,000 yuan and imposed a fine of 15,000 yuan, while also confiscating the tools used in the crime, including his phone and computer.

The dispute in the case is whether the act of bypassing the Great Firewall can be directly linked to the subsequent profits from cryptocurrency trading, and whether such profits can be deemed illegal gains. Legal opinions suggest that the illegality of bypassing the Great Firewall primarily lies in the use of illegal channels, while cryptocurrency trading itself is not illegal. It lacks rationality to classify subsequent profits as illegal gains solely based on the act of bypassing the Great Firewall.