Blockchain case big data report

As shown in the figure above, among contract disputes, unnamed contract disputes (other causes of action) are the most, followed by loan contract disputes, and sales contract disputes rank third.

It should be noted that a considerable part of disputes over unnamed contracts and loan contracts are caused by digital currency investment disputes. This fact also reflects the current status of the blockchain industry to a certain extent.

Xinhua Daily once published an article saying that Bitcoin is the first successful application of blockchain, and the transactions of digital currencies based on blockchain technology such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and grapefruit coins still occupy a very important position in the blockchain industry , Related disputes involving digital currency transactions and investments are also on the rise year after year.

What needs to be reminded here is that, on the one hand, due to the uncertainty of the legal nature of these digital currencies; Therefore, investors should be vigilant and pay attention to risk prevention.

(2) Intellectual property rights and competition disputes

As shown in the figure above, among the intellectual property rights and competition disputes related to the blockchain, intellectual property ownership and infringement disputes account for the vast majority. After further study of relevant cases, we found that in such disputes, the blockchain is mainly used as A tool for depositing evidence appeared.

For example, in the dispute between China Online Digital Publishing Group Co., Ltd. and Guangzhou Dongjing Computer Technology Co., Ltd. infringing on the right to disseminate information on the network of works, Truth Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. issued an explanation of the principle of blockchain storage technology: Truth Technology Products The service is provided through the combination of cloud computing and blockchain. All calculations, evidence collection processes and evidence storage are carried out on the truth preservation cloud and seamlessly written into the judicial alliance chain;

If Bitcoin is a successful application of blockchain technology, then for practitioners in the legal industry, blockchain deposit certificates have been quite mature and have greatly facilitated the work of practitioners, reduced costs, and improved efficiency.

Nowadays, various Internet courts have introduced blockchain to store evidence, and the Supreme People's Court has taken the lead in building a unified platform for blockchain and a judicial chain. Blockchain technology is being applied to the entire process of electronic litigation and online case handling, benefiting legal practitioners.

(3) Labor and personnel disputes

The labor dispute cases related to the blockchain are mainly lawsuits caused by companies in the related blockchain field defaulting on employee wages and cases in which laborers apply for enforcement of labor dispute arbitration awards.

To some extent, the number of labor disputes is often related to the operating conditions of enterprises in the industry. In terms of time distribution, there were 11 labor disputes in 2017 and 2018, and in 2019 , and that number has grown to 56.

First, we can speculate that the number of practitioners in the blockchain industry is constantly increasing, so the number of related disputes is also increasing year after year.

Second, as we all know, the salary level of the blockchain industry is relatively high. Due to the early development of the industry, the development of some enterprises is also unstable, and a considerable number of enterprises will also be affected by the fluctuation of digital currency prices. There may also be more layoffs.

Third, due to the fact that a considerable number of blockchain companies may not have the word "blockchain" in their company names, most labor and personnel disputes will end in the labor arbitration stage, and the cases involved do not The term "blockchain" will appear, and the real judicial precedent data should be much more than what is mentioned in this article.

2. Cases of Criminal Judgment

Using blockchain as the keyword, we retrieved 34 criminal cases.

(1) Crimes of disrupting the order of the socialist market economy

Among these cases, there are 24 crimes that disrupt the order of the socialist market economy, including 17 crimes of organizing and leading pyramid schemes, 5 crimes of illegally absorbing public deposits, and 2 crimes of fund-raising fraud.

The above three types of cases are all illegal fund-raising cases, and the common characteristics are that there are many people involved, cross-province or even cross-border, and the amount involved is large.

It can be said that the blockchain industry is the hardest hit area for illegal fund-raising cases. The recent concentrated reports of official media are also mostly related to illegal fund-raising crimes in the blockchain industry.

The crime of organizing and leading MLM activities is often related to digital currency. On March 15, 2019, Chainfa, together with Anti-MLM Network and ChainDD, jointly released a list of the top 100 MLM coins in the second half of 2018, detailing the MLM coins. (Coin Offensive and Defensive Way｜List of Top 100 MLM Coins in the Second Half of 2018)

The crime of illegally absorbing public deposits involving blockchain is also related to digital currency.

For example, in the case of Ni Tingying’s crime of illegally absorbing public deposits, the court found that from the end of 2015 to June 2016, the defendant Ni Tingying used the high returns of investing in virtual currency projects such as Wanmou and Limou as a bait, in Yiwu City, Pujiang The county and other places introduced investment Wan, Li, etc. to the unspecified public, and helped Li 4 (handled in another case) and others illegally absorb funds of RMB 1,141,450.

At the same time, we noticed that in the case of the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits, the recovered criminal proceeds were returned to the victim, while in the case of the crime of organizing and leading pyramid schemes, most of the criminal proceeds were turned over to the state treasury.

The main difference between fund-raising fraud and illegal absorption of public deposits lies in whether the criminal has the purpose of illegally occupying the absorbed deposits.

For example, in the case of Zhao XX and Cui XX in the crime of fund-raising fraud and illegal absorption of public deposits, the defendant Zhao XX set up the Zhangjiakou branch of Zhou Brothers Media Co., Ltd. without approval to collect deposits from unspecified people in the society. Main business, the fact that it illegally absorbed public deposits existed, and the amount should be determined as 1.7117 million yuan based on actual income.

In order to absorb funds, it concealed the fact that its company was terminated by fabricating a false equity investment agreement, hired a so-called financing team, and used false names. If he refuses to disclose the whereabouts of funds after being brought to the case, it should be determined that he has the subjective intention to illegally occupy other people's property, and his behavior constitutes the crime of fund-raising fraud;

Defendant Cui Moumou, knowing that Zhou Moumou Brothers Media Co., Ltd. and Zhangjiakou Branch had no qualifications for borrowing money, and since its establishment began to illegally absorb public deposits as its main business, he still organized relevant business personnel to help Zhao Moumou absorb deposits from the public and seize The high commission and the huge amount disrupted the normal financial order, and his behavior constituted the crime of illegally absorbing public deposits.

Similarly, in this case, the court ruled that 93,000 yuan of stolen money should be returned to the victim, and the remaining 1,618,700 yuan should be recovered and returned to the victim.

(2) Property infringement cases

Among the property infringement cases, there were 6 cases of fraud and 1 case of extortion.

Fraud crimes related to the blockchain are mostly criminals defrauding money in the name of the blockchain. It is worth noting the Wang Yumin fraud case [(2019) Zhejiang 0604 Xingchu No. 486]. The judgment document reads: "Alipay Company The statement that the hash value of the content stored in the disc issued is consistent with the hash value stored on the "Forensic Evidence Chain" blockchain", this is the first time we have seen blockchain technology used in criminal cases for evidence preservation and fixed".

The only blockchain-related extortion case discovered so far is related to the self-media of the blockchain industry.

Chen Moumou’s first-instance criminal judgment for extortion [(2019) Beijing 0108 Xingchu No. 55] shows that the defendant Chen Moumou is the operator of a blockchain self-media, and he instructed the company’s editors to piece together unverified network information. The famous article "Knowing the Emperor's Funds Broken, Publishing Air Coin SOC to cash out 300 million for his blood transfusion" was published on the Internet platform. In order to eliminate the adverse effects, the victim unit negotiated with Chen Moumou, and Chen Moumou said that the victim unit should accept his price A cooperation agreement of RMB 500,000, and after receiving the payment of RMB 100,000 from the victim unit, the article was deleted on some online platforms.

The Beijing Haidian District People's Court held that the above-mentioned acts of the defendant Chen Moumou constituted the crime of extortion, and sentenced him to three years in prison and a fine of RMB 10,000.

(3) The crime of sabotaging computer systems

We also retrieved one blockchain-related crime of sabotaging a computer system.

According to the description of the (2019) Shanghai 0120 Xingchu No. 435 Judgment, in June 2018, after the defendant Wu Moumou discovered that the global blockchain digital asset trading platform "IDAX" had a "fake recharge" loophole, he ordered the defendant Deng Moumou to A registered account cnseudarker@zoho.com.cn on the platform with a false identity and verified his real name. Later, the defendant Wu Moumou used online tools on the "dark net" to attack the "false recharge" loophole on the platform, and added recharge data, thereby falsely recharging TEDA (USTD) into his account.

Afterwards, the defendant Wu Moumou bought 15 bitcoins and 232 ethers with TEDA coins obtained by false recharging and extracted them into his electronic wallet, causing Shanghai Wushi Information Technology Co., Ltd., the technical maintenance party of the "IDAX" platform, to directly The economic loss was 40,000 yuan. In the end, the People's Court of Fengxian District, Shanghai held that the defendants Wu Moumou and Deng Moumou had committed the crime of sabotaging computer information systems, and were sentenced to two years and six months in prison, with their sentences suspended for two years and six months.

There are two points worth noting in this case:

The first is the qualitative issue of the case

From an intuitive point of view, we think that the perpetrator may constitute the crime of theft by using calculation and system loopholes to recharge himself.

With the keyword "recharging through loopholes", some cases of theft can also be retrieved. For example, (2017) Su 0114 Xingchu No. 357 Judgment shows that on March 5, 2017, the defendants Qiao and Zong conspired to use The method of recharging phone bills by using loopholes learned through joint funding, when using Alipay to recharge phone bills on the phone bill recharging page of the victim unit Nanjing Zhuorui Network Technology Co., Ltd., using packet capture software to modify the transaction amount set by the system to RMB 0.01, which is The recharge of their mobile phone accounts totaled 5,600 yuan.

Qiao Mou also recharged his friend Zhang Mou's phone bill with a total of RMB 1,500. Zong made a total profit of RMB 5,599.88, and Qiao made a total profit of RMB 7,099.85. The People's Court of Yuhuatai District, Nanjing City held that the above acts constituted the crime of theft.

It is also the behavior of using computer system loopholes to recharge. Recharging phone charges is defined as the crime of theft, and recharging bitcoin and ether is defined as the crime of destroying the computer system. The reason why the use of computer system loopholes to steal bitcoin may constitute the crime of theft, We have discussed in the article "Theft of Bitcoin does not constitute theft?" (Chain Law Research｜Theft of Bitcoin does not constitute theft?).

On the basis of this article, we believe that the judiciary’s identification of similar behavior as a crime of sabotaging computer systems may be due to avoiding the qualitative and value determination of related digital currencies.

The second noteworthy issue in this case is the determination of the losses suffered by the victims of the case.

Judging from the statement of the judgment document and the statement of the public prosecutor in the case trial video, the public prosecutor believes that the loss caused by the two defendants to the trading platform is the loss caused by the destruction of the computer system itself, rather than the loss caused by the theft of virtual currency (not considered for the time being) reimbursement).

In fact, when the defendant involved in the case recharged bitcoin and ethereum, the price of bitcoin was more than $6,000 each, and the price of ether was more than $400 each. Therefore, the value of the property involved in the case was $182,800 The above is about RMB 1.2 million.

At the same time, according to the provisions of Article 264 of the "Criminal Law", whoever steals a particularly large amount of public or private property or has other particularly serious circumstances shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years or life imprisonment, and shall also be fined or confiscated property. According to Article 1 of the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in Handling Criminal Cases of Theft, the amount of stolen property is particularly huge if the value of the stolen property is more than 300,000 to 500,000 yuan.

Judging from the judgment documents, the two defendants in this case were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of two years and six months, probation of two years and six months, and fixed-term imprisonment of one year and six months, probation of one year and six months. Compared with the sentencing standards for theft It can be seen that the same behavior is evaluated as different crimes, and there may be huge differences in sentencing.

The above-mentioned issues were also mentioned in the previous article of the chain legal team (court view: Bitcoin can be the object of fraud).

Three points were clearly mentioned in the (2016) Yue 19 Xing Zhong No. 573 judgment of the Dongguan Intermediate People's Court:

1. Although Bitcoin is data in terms of physical attributes, in real life, it is universal and disposable, can be traded publicly, and has strong circulation. It can also be realized through professional trading platforms, and has high property value. value;

2. Bitcoin is different from game currency and game equipment. Although the current Supreme Court’s opinion on the theft of virtual property such as game coins and game equipment is to convict and punish computer crimes such as illegally obtaining computer information system data, the main purpose is to solve the problem that game coins exist in a small range (limited to in-game), price, etc. Difficult to determine, etc., but Bitcoin does not have these problems. There are obvious differences between Bitcoin and game currency, game equipment, etc., and there is a big gap between the two in terms of scope of use, audience, tradability, and value determination;

3. Although our country emphasizes the control and risk prevention of Bitcoin, it has not banned it. Article 127 of the newly promulgated "General Principles of Civil Law" stipulates that "if the law has provisions on the protection of data and network virtual property, follow its provisions." Although there are no detailed rules, there is already a concept of protection of network virtual property at the macro-legislative level . No matter from the point of view of life practice or the appellant's huge benefits from it, it is in line with common sense to recognize Bitcoin as public and private property in the sense of criminal law.