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Japan Considers Treating Bitcoin As Conventional Currency (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the it's-real-money-already dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Regulators in Japan are considering officially recognizing bitcoins and other digital currencies as valid methods of payment. The Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA) is in the process of deciding whether to make legislative revisions to regulation that currently regards virtual currencies as objects rather than traditional forms of payment. Under the new proposal, consumers will be able to purchase goods and services using bitcoin and other digital currencies, and also use them as an alternative to legal tender through purchases or trades. The new definition will be submitted during the current session of the Diet, Japan's legislature, which concludes on 1st June this year.

21 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. tax by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    and more tax

  2. Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies to avoid the need for a government to bless (and therefore control) a particularly unit of money?

    >> consumers will be able to purchase goods and services using bitcoin and other digital currencies

    I believe this is already possible - no government blessing necessary, thank you.

    1. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies to avoid the need for a government to bless (and therefore control) a particularly unit of money?

      But, seriously, whoever believed that it would be magically exempted from government attention?

      I always thought the whole "yarg, it's digital therefore free from teh government" to be ridiculous. Sure, smear yourself in unicorn poop, it has magical properties.

      There was simply never going to be a scenario in which governments went "well, dammit, it's digital and they say it's exempt from us, guess there's nothing we can do".

      Anybody who believed that was delusional.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Intention doesn't indicate reality. Bitcoin isn't even a currency; it's a commodity and, like gold, makes a terrible currency.

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      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    3. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >> like gold, makes a terrible currency

      You lost me there. For most of recorded history, gold has made a terrific currency - the kind you can power regional empires on.

    4. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Bitcoin is currency. What it's not is money; meaning Bitcoin can't be passed from person to person with liquidity and expressed with a self-explanatory denomination.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    5. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Gold by itself is a commodity. But it IS money if it's been minted by a sovereign government; the Golden Eagle coin or the Krugerrand. Now, depending on the value of the metal, both parties may either accept it for face value, or its spot price (commodity value).

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    6. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by Opportunist · · Score: 2

      No currency actually needs governmental "blessing". Currency is anything that people agree on as a means to represent a value. That which is used as currency only needs a few qualities, the most important one being that generating or producing it has to take more effort than the value it represents. No, scarcity isn't even required. This holds true from commodity money to fiat money. Generating it either has to be more costly or risky than "earning" it and whatever has this quality qualifies as money.

      In the end, what matters is whether someone else deems it valuable enough to accept it as payment. Government blessing only matters as long as there is any faith in that government. As can easily be seen with some third world countries where you can't even buy a bag of dirt with the local currency. Backing by government is only meaningful as a tool to increase faith in a certain currency, or more exactly, faith in its ability to stay valuable, so I can trade it for something else in the future.

      Government backing of currencies serves only one possible other purpose, especially when dealing with fiat money: A promise that they will do what they can to keep forgeries from circulating. That matters little with bitcoins.

      So, in the end, government "blessing" of crypto-currencies only mean something if your faith in the government is higher than that in the currency.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    7. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >> try buying a Snickers bar with gold buillon

      Well that's a bad example, since I'm pretty sure I could walk out of my office and find dozens of people who would trade any amount of bullion for a single Snickers bar. A better example would be "try to buy something from Amazon with bullion"...but the statement "try to buy something from Amazon with crumpled dollar bills" would be as equally ludicrous.

      Are we at least agreed that only digital currencies (whether Bitcoin or dollars) are the only real/complete currencies today (due to fungibility)?

    8. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      No, gold was used as a currency for most of recorded history. It was used as a currency in poor societies where the majority of trade was barter, and where actual money was restricted to a rich elite class who traded in a symbol to remind them that their glorious empire favored them and could make them poor.

      Gold isn't just deflationary, as the naive analysis would suggest--as we find ways to produce a thing with less labor, its representative buying power falls, as it now represents 1/10,000,000 of the people working in the fields rather than 1/10,000. Gold is also relative: maybe today we have a new way to mine or smelt gold with less labor, and so gold ingots are worth a lot less; and next week we realize the mines are running dry, so gold is worth a lot more because we can get the *same* number of tonnes of gold out only by employing *three times as much* labor-hours; and then we find a new mine and gold is suddenly worth very little.

      That means commodity currency is unstable. The amount of buying power per unit currency fluctuates greatly because it's tied directly to labor. Fiat currencies approach a unit value approximated by the amount of income divided by the amount of production: all the money paid for all things made and sold is what represents all things made and sold. It's a definition by tautology. (Income / Production) just says "the amount of money we pay for things is equal to the amount of money we pay for those things". This means fiat currencies gain buying power (deflation) as we create new technology to reduce labor used to make things; and, unlike commodity currency (gold, silver, sheep), we can counteract this (neutral) or exceed this (inflation) by printing and introducing more money. We can also print up more money as population expands, leaving production scarcity to control population growth.

      Gold only made a good currency when we had a very small set of extremely rich people and a large population of serfs. The Roman Empire's Equestrian class was 25,000 strong in a population of over 50,000,000 (.05%), whereas our top 10% have a similar proportion of the wealth spread among them (they also have *more* total wealth, and only our poorest are actually less-wealthy than rich Roman senators). The Romans only had to keep their serfs alive and clothed with last year's fashion, which they tossed out of their wardrobes when a new fashion came out, handing down rich people's old clothes as poor people's new clothes. Of course gold was a workable currency for the tiniest sliver of overly-rich assholes running everything; nobody else had to use it!

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    9. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by slashping · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Bitcoin fixes the biggest problem with gold: gold is hard to divide into smaller bits, and hard to make sure it's real and the correct amount.

    10. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by SpankiMonki · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Does Bitcoin even have pennies?

      They're called "Satoshis". 1 Satoshi = .00000001 bitcoin = $0.0000042475.

    11. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      You're missing one small detail:

      Citizens comprise the government.

      If citizens demand that the government has no jurisdiction of digital currency eventually the government must bends it will to the masses.

      The problem isn't the government; it's all the spineless people who allow the government to dictate and micro-manage the citizen's live.

    12. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by slashping · · Score: 3

      If citizens demand that the government has no jurisdiction of digital currency eventually the government must bends it will to the masses.

      You're so naive, it's cute.

    13. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by iggymanz · · Score: 2

      false; a government controlled by, in the pockets of and in debt to a banking cartel does not follow the desires of its citizens. examples: USA, UK.

      your childlike naivety is humorous.

    14. Re:Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies... by penguinoid · · Score: 2

      Do you not realize that the expansion of the economy is almost entirely due to debt?

      I think you mean, due to massive amounts of automation, international trade, power generating capacity, and modern technology. Do you think in historical times a person who considered himself poor could be expected to be able to buy ~half a ton of wheat for one day's work?

      --
      Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  3. makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    the venn diagrams of bitcoin, katana and anime enthusiasts are basically a single circle

  4. Bold move considering their negative interest rate by Crashmarik · · Score: 2

    Japan is already forcing people to horde cash with their negative interest rates.

    http://fortune.com/2016/02/23/...

    Something like bitcoin could prove disastrous for their banking system.

  5. Re:Good idea. by slashping · · Score: 2

    but as soon as somebody figures out your wallet id

    That's why you don't keep all your bitcoin in a single wallet. I make a new wallet every time someone wants to send me bitcoin, so until I spend it, there's only a single input into the wallet. And when you spend part of the wallet(s), you can send the change to a new wallet.

  6. Re:Good idea. by StillAnonymous · · Score: 2

    The biggest criminals in the world are the banks and governments.

    The biggest money launderers are the banks.

    The biggest supporters of terrorism are governments.

    Regulating bitcoin does not stop any of the above. It might inconvenience some small time criminals, but the people it hurts the most are the average citizens. You give governments complete control over a person's financial state, and you will see what crimes against humanity they will commit. This "we're doing it to eliminate crime" is nothing but a lie that the government uses to convince simple minds to go along with the plan.

  7. Re:Good idea. by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2

    as somebody figures out your wallet id which you need to share with anybody you transfer a coin from or to, they can go get your entire history

    That's not how Bitcoin works. You can have any number of wallets, and most Bitcoin clients support the new "HD" (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallet format, where many "IDs" are generated from a master key using a one-way function. A single key can provide an infinite stream of distinct addresses, one for each transaction. Without the master key there is nothing to link these addresses together. You don't give people "your wallet ID", you give them an address unique to that one transaction. When you spend the bitcoins later you send the change to a different unique address; if you do it right then it won't be obvious to third-parties which output was the expenditure and which was the change.

    The one case that is more difficult to avoid is when you need to combine multiple inputs together to cover a single larger expenditure. The fact that the inputs were used in the same transaction is fair evidence that they are controlled by the same entity. This is where schemes like CoinJoin and mixing services can help to preserve anonymity, by combining many unrelated inputs and redistributing the sums to new addresses in standardized denominations, thus breaking the link between the inputs and the outputs. It is possible to implement this using blinded signatures such that even the mixing service doesn't which inputs are linked to which outputs.

    Then there is the fact that "your entire history" is limited to your transactions on the blockchain, which are still pseudonymous for both senders and receivers—it would take a whole lot of old-fashioned detective work to determine the real-world identities of everyone you've traded with even after their (one-time-use) Bitcoin addresses are known.

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat