Bitcoin in County Towns
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Bitcoin in County Towns
Not the dream of decentralization, but account freezes, fund risk controls, fraud allegations, and unsolvable cases that can't be handled.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Liu Honglin
Only by walking through vast expanses can one understand human smallness. Only by wandering through history can one grasp the brevity of life. Walking and imagination help us shed external attachments and discover our own insignificance. Knowing truth is hard to grasp, we stop insisting on being right. Knowing all things have spirit, we no longer place ourselves above others.
This is how director Jia Zhangke begins his book "Jia Xiang," written in the dusty winds of Dunhuang.
From Linfen, Shanxi, to Dunhuang nearly two thousand kilometers away, the journey is long. My bedtime reading comes from this native of Fenyang, Shanxi. Reading about his life starting from Fenyang—memories revolving around video parlors, cassette tapes, and county art troupes—he says that small towns are the most authentic and substantial part of Chinese society. That’s his origin, and also his lens for observing China.
That’s why Jia Zhangke’s films always revolve around small towns. He doesn’t shoot skyscrapers, but people in places like Linfen, Fenyang, and Taiyuan. In the documentary "Xiao Wu: A Fenyang Boy Named Jia Zhangke," he recalls how, when his teacher showed the class the film "Dong Cunrui," the female class monitor cried, and everyone was told to learn from her. Back then, he didn’t know "expression" could be a profession. But times changed too fast—reality became more intense than any script. All he did was use a small town as a viewfinder, capturing out-of-focus moments from China’s transformation.
The small town is China’s intermediate state—neither rural village in the traditional sense, nor a first-tier city. Here you see government buildings, department stores, elaborately decorated wedding companies, but also tricycles beside vegetable markets, power poles plastered with "get documents made here" ads, and elderly people in floral cotton-padded jackets. Small towns carry the scent of commercial society and the stickiness of personal relationships; they have modern skin and a traditional skeleton. This is China’s most authentic mixed reality.
Yet in this reality, the Bitcoin we know barely exists.
In cafes in Shanghai and Shenzhen, people discuss Bitcoin as a technological revolution, a global value network. You hear entrepreneurs talk about RWA, L2 scaling, DAO governance, on-chain settlements; Web3 conferences, Hong Kong licensing, Singapore compliance, token economies—making it seem as if we’re witnessing a wave poised to replace the old world. But once you step into a small town, cryptocurrency reality looks completely different.
A lawyer friend working in a county town told me he has handled many cases related to "virtual currency" in recent years—almost all occurring in prefecture-level cities or counties in northwestern or central regions. He mentioned a real case: a young man from a small town earned tens of yuan per transaction helping others exchange USDT for RMB via WeChat. In his early twenties, poorly educated, with no financial knowledge whatsoever, he saw this "side job" as low-threshold and low-risk—just a few WeChat messages, one bank card, a small fee. "I’m just helping someone swap coins, not cheating anyone." It wasn’t until police came knocking that he realized he was a money conduit in a fraud scheme. When questioned by the judge, he couldn’t even explain where the funds came from or went to.
This story isn’t isolated. In small towns, "Bitcoin" isn’t about decentralization dreams—it’s account freezes, fund risk controls, fraud allegations, and unsolvable legal cases. There’s no demand for USDT cross-border settlement, no entry point into Web3 ecosystems, no influencers explaining cold wallets or MetaMask. People usually first hear about "cryptocurrency" when someone gets scammed, trapped in a group chat, or their money vanishes after a transfer.
Over time, the impression of cryptocurrency in small towns isn’t technology or future—it’s just two words: "scammers."
This creates a visible split: inside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, cryptocurrency means startup funding, policy analysis, keynote speeches at Web3 summits—a terminology world discussing compliance, stablecoins, PayFi, tokenization. Outside the Fifth Ring, cryptocurrency means frozen accounts, fleeing from scam groups, police warnings, court cases—the reality of conversations like, "Do you know that fellow from our hometown who does crypto?"
Small towns aren’t short of smartphones or information channels—they lack only the foundational trust and practical contexts needed to understand these technologies. Here, Bitcoin isn’t "digital gold," but a synonym for "high risk." Say Ethereum is an asset issuance platform, and it sounds like some scam code. Say Web3 represents ideal decentralized governance, and people imagine only "pig-butchering scams."
And within information dissemination systems, such misunderstandings only grow. In big-city social circles, you see news about Pre-A rounds closed, projects featured on TechCrunch’s homepage, speeches in Singapore about "global asset circulation." But in county-town WeChat groups, what circulates are stories like "a female college student lost 600,000 yuan gambling on crypto," "local police warn against virtual currency trading," and painful experiences shared about "bank cards frozen for three months with no way to unblock."
Small towns aren’t backward—they simply live under a different order. Within this context, Bitcoin and Web3 are nearly impossible to explain clearly, even though they do possess technical depth and global potential. But reality won’t grant positive recognition just because your tech is sound.
This is why, when we in the industry discuss compliance pathways, infrastructure building, and stablecoins’ global settlement capabilities, we must acknowledge that this industry operates in layers within China. Inside and outside the Fifth Ring exist two financial languages, two information systems, two risk perceptions, two life orders. Townspeople aren’t outsiders—they’re often simply "the last to be spoken about."
Bitcoin isn’t incapable of entering small towns; we’ve just not yet found the right way to tell its story. Explaining token economic models to grassroots civil servants overwhelmed by "USDT money laundering" or "telecom fraud conduit" cases feels distant and powerless. And for families burned by Ponzi schemes, even the most advanced technology struggles to earn a second chance at trust.
But sometimes we need perspective: for many frontline law enforcement officers, it’s not opposition to technology, but lack of bandwidth to understand it. Their daily caseload already exhausts them—telecom fraud, money laundering, cross-border funds, frozen accounts—each thread tied to countless families’ losses. They don’t see the future of "blockchain technology," only the present reality of "on-chain funds" driving people to bankruptcy. It’s not that they don’t want to understand—it’s that reality gives them no time to do so.
Ordinary residents in small towns also struggle to distinguish scams hidden behind marketing jargon. The difference between stablecoins and传销 coins, the boundary between platform tokens and points, the distance between blockchain projects and Ponzi schemes—for most county users, there’s virtually no tool for judgment. This lack of "financial literacy" is the deep reason why scams repeatedly succeed. When you see people around you get defrauded, you naturally label the entire industry.
If technology wants to truly enter life, it must first learn to speak life’s language. Small towns aren’t marginal zones—they’re a real context we’ve yet to seriously engage with. It’s not about making them adapt to our vocabulary, but about us learning to understand their language. Perhaps Bitcoin’s story, beyond being told at Web3 conferences and in funding news, should also unfold in more ordinary places.
The tide of technology will eventually come, but what it must traverse isn’t just dust and wind—it’s misunderstanding, caution, and silence.
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