Topic: Why is Bitcoin not popular in Japan? (Read 3377 times)

Add to this the commonality of both the names "Satoshi" and "Nakamoto". Especially Satoshi. Basically, bitcoin was invented by John Smith.

On top of this, his time-of-postings pattern on this forum lead me to believe he was in the US on the East Coast.  That is what would match best.  Perhaps he had irregular sleeping patterns, but unless he consistently woke up long after dark and went to sleep in the afternoon, his posting times wouldn't match someone living in Japan.

Believe it or not, I don't fully dis-agree with your assessment even though I have pretty much zero confidence in any data provided by (or filtered through)  the governments of the US, Japan, or anyone under the auspices of the UNAEC all of whom are complete victims of regulatory capture.  Geiger counters are pretty limited in deducing most kinds of long-running risks.  I have several kinds of scintilation detectors to independantly verify what I wish to verify for my own purposes here on the West Coast of the US.

I do believe that the situation in Tokyo is much less than fine for the MANY people who ARE going to be victims of excess cases of cancer.  And much of Fukushima and the valuable farmland that it had need to be written off completely for the immediate good of the inhabitants.  For a country like Japan this loss is an unmitigated disaster.  The only saving grace is that they were already a dieing race so their need to feed themselves was decreasing.

Now to be fair, we really should weigh the benefits that the nation of Japan and the people of Japan have realized in their use of nuclear power.  Also, the pros and cons of their nuclear weapons program (which is, I believe, why they were fucking around with plutonium...like everyone else who does so...)  I personally do not write off the utility of MAD, nor the potential for China to decide it's time for some pay-back at some point.  All that said, if nobody with a dysfunctional regulatory system should fuck around with any form of nuclear anything no matter what the benefit.  I'm particularly unhappy about those in East Asia doing so since the fallout heads my way.  I'll bet that China melts one down within a decade.

Apologies in advance for the off-topic-ness:


I was following the Gundersen reports- until he did that video I'd thought of him as a good point of view at the most alarming end of the non-bonkers scale, but there he's clearly trying to mislead people. Firstly he's talking like he's getting soil samples from anywhere, but really he's getting them from the edges of gutters and drains, where the little bit of radioactive cesium that rained on Tokyo would accumulate. Secondly instead of talking about how radioactive his samples actually are and saying there's a health risk, he's come up with this elaborate thing about what would happen if you produced that at a nuclear power station, where they have very strict rules about how you dispose of your rubbish.

Tokyo is not a "radioactive waste dump". Radioactivity in Tokyo is being independently measured by the government, universities, independent groups like Safecast and thousands of concerned mums who bought their own geiger counters. It's fine.

The rapidly aging demographic is another very big concern for Japan.  I don't know if it would implode in 2 years, the yen is still relatively strong and thus can be devalued rather significantly but the writing certainly looks like its on the wall.

FTR:

 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo  :  I used the 'metro' figure.

 - http://enenews.com/ap-headline-gundersen-tokyo-soil-be-nuclear-waste - http://vimeo.com/38995781

 -  Although a bit of a philosophical issue, a function of governments of states which are not 'failed' is one of managing regulatory bodies.  When the regulatory bodies fail, the buck stops with the government.  The regulatory bodies with oversight of nuclear technology have probably failed as badly in the US as they had in Japan.  It was just a role of the dice about who got hit first.

what part of this statement do you take issue with? the size of the city? the claim that it is a radioactive waste dump? or the claim that Japanese leadership caused the disaster?

Going off topic, but: No, it hasn't.

I suspect that this is a strongish hypothesis.  Most people I know in the US feel an innate sense of subversiveness when I describe Bitcoin to them.  Same with using mega.co.nz cloud storage.  I would expect both to be pretty fringe for a long time in societies that have either a cultural aversion or legitimate (or imagined) fear in being associated with subversive activities (read 'China'.)

Of course the leadership of Japan has just turned a city of 35x10^6 into what can only be described as a radioactive waste dump.  How much that will strain the Japaneses cultural affinity toward the trust in authority will be an interesting question.  I suspect perhaps not much...the leadership's management decisions ended up getting Tokyo firebombed once and the cultural affinities remained fairly strong.

with Abe's new program of printing to infinity, its clear they are determined to spark inflation.  Japan has the highest debt:GDP ratio of any country in the world; approximately 250%.  they are in trouble.

there are several high profile investors betting on the Japanese economy imploding within 2 yrs as a result; Kyle Bass, Hugh Hendry, Nassim Taleb.

Yes, I do feel the same. Japan has been living with very low inflation, even deflation for many years, so they feel they didn't need Bitcoin that much. Things are currently changing, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abenomics
http://www.ecb.int/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/eurofxref-graph-jpy.en.html

And keep in mind that public debt in Japan is higher than in Greece...

It is getting popular in Japan:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxJPY#igWeeklyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzcv

Once people have bitcoins I think they then speculate in dollars.

The Japanese banksters have had a go at "quantitative easing", I believe.

No one has mentioned that Japan hasn't seen any inflation for 20 years. Broad money supply has essentially been fixed for a long long time. That takes away a pretty big selling point of bitcoin don't you think?

I'm no expert but I imagine Japan has also had pretty good mobile payment systems for decades, given that they all had smartphones when the rest of the world was could still only send picture messages if the recipient had an identical Nokia phone model!

alot of people think the UK is not really on the bitcoin spectrum, due to lack of knowledge, yet the 3d nodes map shows 2 area's in UK at the top yet only one in USA. closed communities where most people only speak to people around them in their native language and cultures dont really see what is happening in different languages they cannot read.

http://blockchain.info/nodes-globe
based purely on bitcoin population vs location, Europe has more bitcoin involvement than the USA.. i think its now time everyone on this international forum of bitcoin to start thinking about bitcoin as EURO valued more often then dollar valued. just to be more fair to the majority of viewers.

and as for the satoshi chatter:
considering programmers decided to call how to create a cryptocoin 'mining' has a very very tiny chance that it makes bitcoin anything like gold.

you cant melt it, bend it, make jewellery out of it, or put it onto a girls finger when asking her to marry you. bitcoin is nothing like gold.

its an asset, such as antiques or art. great to look at but useless and doing anything else but viewing and holding value. it is not a commodity like gold.

and my point.

just naming something abstract makes people totally believe that's what it must be linked to. closing their minds to the obvious evidence that its not what you first think when looking at its name.

hah that's really bad ass

ill just put this here

http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/8/9/2/48892.jpg?v=1

In South Korea, students protest and riot several times to get rid of consecutive dictatorship before they have a democracy.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2009/05/protests-in-korea.html

Makes you wonder why the most rebellious of all people, the Korean, are not accepting bitcoin everywhere in their society. 

In a p2p foundation profile. http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profile/SatoshiNakamoto

He's also 37 years old.

Ok but we are talking in one case about ignoring authority and in the other defying or maybe even out right combating authority. This is because it is in the economic interest of consumers to avoid the white market in intellectual property where as with bitcoin its in the economic interest of most individuals to chose the white market over the grey market that is the bitcoin community.