Japan’s goal of creating a cashless society has got one step closer with the release of J–Coin Pay — a smartphone-based digital wallet that uses QR codes to provide payment services.
Despite the name, however, J-Coin has even less to do with cryptocurrency than the recently announced JPMCoin, which in cryptocurrency terms was dismissed by many as a pretender.
The wallet app, which became available to Japanese citizens on March 1st, is the result of the collaboration of sixty banks, and represents a way to complete all payment-related processes, including sending, receiving, and paying money, from a single dashboard.
https://paperblockchain.com/japans-banks-launch-digital-coin-but-blockchain-is-nowhere-to-be-seen/This is a reason why not all "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" news is as relevant as you think.
A lot of these news are in fact, completely unrelated to any kind of movement to decentralisation. A lot of the hyped up stuff are in fact just digital payment processing that was already previously done anyways, and/or blockchain used as internal infrastructure in businesses, which isn't necessarily a bad thing at all since it's still blockchain adoption, but it's certainly not using blockchain as a decentralised payment network.
Furthermore, the government issued coins that have been popping up in recent days have definitely formed a trend. I personally dismiss all of them, because they all breach the underlying principles of BTC, of decentralisation, trustlessness, and independent store of value.
