Oh I certainly am not intending to offend anyone. What I'm saying is all things being equal (which appears to be the consensus from North American's and Europeans here?), 8 is as arbitrary as 4, but apparently is less upsetting to the largest number of people. It also seems like Asia just generally adapts quicker to new technology culturally than European and North American markets. I had Japanese friends laugh at our cell phones (this was the pre iPhone days) in the states and tell us they'd had features like that for years. "Every kid in Japan is already banking by phone" or whatever it was that now escapes me. I believe I read North America has the least inertia with broadband too despite being a major initial developer. I Believe I also read that North America severely lags behind Europe and Asia in math and science. I'm always reading about some viral technology thing going on in Asia that I have never even heard of. Some mobile app, cyborg conversions, biometric implants, whatever. On the other hand I see things like Facebook and Twitter as an American invention (for better or for worse). Maybe American's want to play bejeweled, post pictures of their food or check in to the gym but not take control of their personal finances or use cool prosthetics.
Granted this is somewhat baseless and purely on observation from the news, but it just seems like Asian markets adapt quicker to new ways of doing things, and therefore they seem the natural catalyst to break a cryptocurrency out of its infancy so long as it doesn't get under the noses of regulators too quickly. I remember all the trollbox FUD about "China banning exchanges!" and the purported associated crash of BTC to sub 1000, then 900, then 800 and so on levels earlier this year. There are assertions floating about in the interwebs that much of the value of BTC was Chinese nationals using it to bypass the strict limitations on moving currency in and out of the country. I would just easily believe it was Wall Street investors, drug dealers, and libertarians too, who knows. I would have to guess laundering money, whether criminal or benign in intent is a natural companion to the utility provided by Bitcoin.
If I have offended you with these statements my apologies in advance. For the record, I am in one of those "Slow" North American markets with crappy broadband before you accuse me of elitism.
Unfortunately, your view of Japan as a "fast-adapting hub of technology" is a very antiquated view of Japan. Japan has been lagging behind in the technology sector for years now, and I would say Japan is anything but "quick to adapt" when it comes to trying new things. Yes, we have NFC payments on our phones already, and we have a few things here and there that might seem "cutting edge", but in reality barely anyone here even knows how to use a PC at the most basic level unless they are trained on the job for it. I mean, I still have to FAX or snail mail most of my documents for business here as 99% of my clients refuse to accept digitally signed PDF files via e-mail.
Japan is, on the whole, scarily xenophobic and simply does not want to use any non-Japanese technology. It took years for Japanese people to warm up to non-Japanese cell phones (like the iPhone, which was a huge flop when it first hit the market here), Facebook (which only in the past couple of years has started to become more common than the Japanese-created SNS mixi), or even YouTube (which still I do not think is as popular as the Japanese-created video site niconico douga).
Anyway, I don't mean this to be a Japan-bashing post or anything like that... I just want to give you some perspective and remind you that America is still the leader of the world when it comes to technological innovation and adoption. Just because you have slow broadband does not mean you guys are losing the technology arms race. I know "the grass is always greener on the other side" and it is easy to fall into a sense of despair when you only cherry-pick the good things from every other country and only focus on the bad within your own, but reality usually tells a different story.
Did you even read the post of Rockethead?