Everyone is afraid China is about to dump $5B of Bitcoin. Here’s the backstory, and here are the facts.
Qian Zhimin ran a Ponzi scheme in China from 2014 to 2017, raising about RMB 40B from 102,000 investors. She put part of it into BTC and fled to the UK. UK police seized roughly 61,900 BTC and she got 11 years and 8 months.
What just happened... a Tianjin court accepted a bid to confiscate the coins, and a UK High Court ruled Chinese law decides whether victims actually own any of it.
What did not happen...China doesn’t have the Bitcoin. The UK still holds it. No transfer order, sale date, or wallet movement yet. Tianjin’s case has a six-month notice window, and about 16,000 victims just got permission to appeal in the UK.
It’s about 0.3% of supply. If these coins ever do get sold, it would likely be staged or OTC, not one big market dump.
The real signal is a final disposal order followed by large transfers to exchanges. Until then, it’s a headline, not a trade.