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Comment by dvcrn | Hacker News Reader

What is the advantage of this? Here in Japan every creditcard is giving you some kind of bonus program and encourages you to use that card for your bills so you automatically aggregate amazon / rakuten (japanese amazon competitor) / ANA / etc points.

I mean, I guess I could exchange every month my yen into bitcoins and then pay with it, but why?

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It would be convenient if you have an income or savings in Bitcoin.

Some people are attracted to using Bitcoin as a day to day currency and payments system, to reduce their dependence on mainstream banking. The "be your own bank" philosophy.

Admittedly right now Bitcoin seems like a novelty, but it will never reach wider use without small "pointless" steps like this.

> Some people are attracted to using Bitcoin as a day to day currency and payments system, to reduce their dependence on mainstream banking. The "be your own bank" philosophy.

Japan is, at least to my understanding, one of the last countries to develop such a mindset in the mainstream.

Ah, that is very interesting. I am not knowledgable about Japanese culture, so my answer was addressing "why pay with Bitcoin" generally.

Japanese culture is so hard to predict when it comes to tech uptake - you see an 80-year old man play with his Nintendo DS at the bus stop, Kyoto City is covered by free Wifi, Internet is fast and cheap, but the ATM closes down at 6pm and your hotel room advertises free fax (which you may actually end up needing)

Atm does not close anymore at 6pm. You are 10 years behind.

Do they still charge a modest (150 yen'ish) fee after hours? ;)

Depends on your bank. Traditional ones do. Lots of upstart banks (like Rakuten, Aeon) that don't.

Yeah, they close at 9pm now

Well the machines get tired and need to go to bed after 9:30pm so it's perfectly reasonable.

Well if the boss is still around until 12pm the machine can work just a little bit longer...

So the originators name Satoshi Nakamoto hasn't inspired more bitcoin adoption in Japan than elsewhere?

Nope. Even if there's adoption due to a possible central bank induced currency collapse, it'll be a small small minority for some time.

Until they manage to stop deflation, a currency collapse is a long ways away.

Don't count Japan out just yet they adopted NFC payment way before it even showed up on the radar of other countries.

NFC communication for exchanging emails or making small payments was a thing before smart phones were popular so there's that.

Japan is weird because in some situations their surprisingly stuck in their ways like with CD sale and in others their surprisingly advanced like the use of NFC.

I dunno about NFC adoption. Aside from train rides, most people here use cash for all their day-to-day transactions. Even though the option has been available for over a decade, it's rare to see someone pay in a store with NFC. Way rarer than e.g. in the UK or Australia.

It would be convenient if you have an income [...] in Bitcoin.

Miners, drug dealers, and who else exactly?

Granted, it's a niche.

Ransomware authors, hitmen, online gambling sites, politicians, etc. All of your favorite people are in!

Software developers.

Just because journalists don't spend a lot of time writing articles about ordinary working people with an income in Bitcoin doesn't mean they don't exist. The news media does not portray a balanced, holistic view of reality. All in all, I think an article about someone just having an income in Bitcoin would be too boring for any editor to accept.

It would be convenient if you have an income or savings in Bitcoin.

Wait, people save money in Bitcoin? If they are saving Bitcoin hoping it will go up in price, then why are they spending Bitcoin, instead of just Yen?

I think I used the wrong word. Perhaps "hold reserves" of Bitcoin. There are some with large stashes who accumulated it in the early days.

And like you said, there are also people who see holding BTC as an investment. But they are probably not paying for their leccy with it.

If your income is foreign (like in EUR or USD), exchanging to bitcoin and paying with it is much cheaper than directly exchanging to yen or whatever the local currency is.

Not my experience. For two years, I received my salary in EUR and lived in the US. I tried to transfer money using Bitcoin instead of wiring it the traditional way but the Bitcoin exchange fees were actually only slightly smaller than the wiring fees. The additional hassle wasn't worth it.

I got between 1-4% over spot while getting paid in USD and transferring to THB through bitcoin exchanges.

It was a difference of hundreds of dollars; well worth the effort.

What is the disadvantage of having another choice of payment ?

Maintaining it.

You might want to exchange for Bitcoin in order to preserve your purchasing power because the BoJ is printing Yen.

You can't pay online with gold.

.. except that real stability of prices in Yen is pretty good, while Bitcoin is highly volatile. Admittedly this is often to the upside - since BTC/$ seems to drift upward over time - but it's definitely not a great inflation hedge.

Your credditcard/bank account can be frozen by the government. Bitcoin can't.

I'll take a trustless payment system any day, to hell with plastic.

You mean trustless as in Mt Gox?

Mtgox was an exchange (a bank in the end), not a wallet. The only people who lost money on that were traders.

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