With the government’s pressure to go cashless, and little competition from credit cards and other forms of e-payment, Japan could leapfrog the technology underlying today’s electronic payment networks and go straight to blockchain.
If the experiment works, the country’s economy might be remade. Everything from huge transactions between banks to small retail purchases could be carried out with barely any delay and at a fraction of the current cost; even today’s credit cards would be slow and expensive by comparison.
There’s at least one more reason to think blockchain-based cash can succeed in Japan: retail investors there already love crypto.
Wow, this is a really great experiment. If something goes wrong, though, it will be a disaster. I am glad that at least they'll be using their own tokens, so the market might not get hit as hard as it could in case of the failure. I certainly hope they'll succeed and demonstrate that cryptocurrencies can be a new and efficient type of money. Japan is known for its good policies towards cryptos. It also recognizes them as legal tender!
A good reason why cryptos can be successful in Japan that wasn't mentioned in this article is its economy. Unlike most of the countries, Japan has a deflationary economy that works quite okay there. With cryptos being naturally deflational, it seems rational that these two should be united. Deflationary economy needs deflationary money.
