How Bitcoin Usage May Rise in Japan BITPoint Japan Co., the company behind Peach Aviation Ltd.’s move to let travelers use bitcoin to pay for tickets, is planning to give hundreds of thousands of Japanese retail outlets the ability to accept the digital currency.“We’re holding discussions with a retail-related company,” Genki Oda, BITPoint’s president, said in a recent interview.“By going through a company providing payment terminal services to shops, we have the possibility of increasing its use at one stroke.It’s easier than talking to lots of individual retailers.”Genki Oda.BITPoint is joining a flurry of companies embracing regulations, enacted in Japan last month, that recognize digital currencies as a form of payment.That has helped to make yen trades one of the world’s largest transaction pools, exceeding China’s pole position at the end of 2016, according to Oda.Bic Camera Inc., one of the country’s biggest electronics retailers, began accepting bitcoin at two stores in Tokyo last month.

“We’re also talking to a big convenience store operator about using it,” said Oda, 36, who also runs BITPoint parent Remixpoint Co., which had a market value of about 21 billion yen ($189 million) on Friday.He said he’s aiming to make an announcement by early next year.The shares of Remixpoint rose as much as 18 percent to their daily price limit.Last week, Remixpoint said it will convert debt issued to BITPoint into equity, raising its ownership in the subsidiary to 97.7 percent.Bitcoin, which debuted eight years ago, is gaining wider use as a way to pay for goods and services, and lets people transact without oversight from governments, regulators or central banks.The virtual currency has been rallying against the dollar and other fiat currencies and was trading at $2,210 on Monday, near record highs.While BITPoint operates as a bitcoin exchange, it’s pushing to promote the use of the cryptocurrency in stores and other retail outlets, instead of as a speculative instrument.The company currently has ties with tens of retailers and plans to expand that number, Oda said.BITPoint Japan’s ATM.A change in Japanese law on April 1 formalized rules around anti-money laundering and put in place standards for security and audits.

Restaurant booking site Gurunavi Inc.sell bitcoin in ghanawill start letting diners pay with bitcoin later this year, the Nikkei newspaper reported last month.bitcoin difficulty levels“It’s funny how the whole narrative of bitcoin being risky or dangerous has changed, and it is now seen as a form of pride to regulate and embrace it,” said Thomas Glucksmann, head of marketing at Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Gatecoin.Asked about the recent climb in bitcoin’s value, Oda said he’s wary of the sudden jump and doesn’t think it’s sustainable.bitcoin api perlAt the same time, Japanese investors and day traders are taking a serious look at bitcoin as an asset class, thanks to the new regulations, he said, adding that several large foreign exchange brokerages will begin bitcoin trading in the coming months, boosting volumes.Still, it’s unclear whether bitcoin payments can become more than a marketing gimmick.bitcoin old man rapper

The biggest hurdles include long network confirmation times and high transaction fees.bitcoin samsung s4While many bitcoin community members rallied around a new proposal last week to fix the problem, deep differences within the group have led to several similar solutions falling through since 2015.bitcoin lottery legalWho Is Alleged Bitcoin Founder Satoshi Nakamoto?python bitcoin installMarch 6 (Bloomberg) -- Bitcoin Shop CEO Charles Allen and Bloomberg's Carter Dougherty discuss a Newsweek magazine report that alleges the creator of Bitcoin is a 64-year-old Japanese-American man living in the Los Angeles area.bitcoin kurs heuteThey speak on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart."bitcoin razor

(Source: Bloomberg) Most Recent VideosSand Hill Exchange was a blockchain bucket shop that let people bet on the eventual public-market prices of hot startups.That is so illegal!It was shut down more or less as soon as anyone noticed that it existed, but the wheels of justice ground slowly on.A few weeks ago, Sand Hill announced that it had settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a $20,000 fine, but the announcement quickly disappeared, leaving me to suspect that the entire thing was just a dream, or a performance art project.But this week the SEC finally announced its enforcement action against Sand Hill, along with an Investor Alert warning of "fantasy stock trading websites."Ihappen to be on vacation, and I realize that there is bigger financial news this week than Sand Hill.There's that AIG decision, and some stuff in Greece, and lord knows people are worried about bond market liquidity.Nonetheless I am interrupting my vacation for Sand Hill, and not for those things, in part because I already started on this post back when they fleetingly announced their settlement.But also because I feel partly responsible for Sand Hill.

You see, a while back I made fun of them, and I got a call from Elaine Ou, one of the two co-founders of the site.She said: "We were just app developers.I thought a derivative was just a bet.Everything I know about derivatives, I learned from reading your blog at Dealbreaker.So in a way this is all your fault."Guys, remember how I frequently say, "This is not legal advice"?It's not legal advice!Don't do anything just because I imply that I'd find it amusing.I'd find your subsequent SEC enforcement action amusing too!I certainly found this one amusing, but my amusement was tempered by guilt.I suppose it would violate my journalistic objectivity to set up a Kickstarter to pay their fine, but, I mean, someone really should.Or maybe send them some bitcoins.Ou's co-founder, Gerrit Hall, has posted his version of events on the company's blog, which tracks the SEC's version closely.Here's how Hall puts it:We were pioneering the concept of “Fantasy VC” – except where fantasy sports lets you draft your favorite players onto a team, Sand Hill Exchange would let you draft your favorite startups into a portfolio for competition.Honestly that sounds kind of boring?

After revamping the model a couple of times between September 2014 and February 2015, Hall and Ou hit upon the clever idea of playing the fantasy-venture-capital game for real money.The new Sand Hill Exchange would let investors buy and sell contracts referencing the value of a private company.Uber, Snapchat, Github, Pinterest, Ello and others all had contracts listed.The contracts would pay off when the underlying company did an initial public offering or was acquired, at a final price based on the IPO or acquisition price.So the main problem is that that is illegal.The law is fairly complicated, but it is quite clear on this point: You can't sell stock derivatives unless (1) you sell them on a registered, regulated exchange or (2) you sell them to big, rich, institutional or similar investors.Sand Hill's way around those rules was to (1) ignore them and (2) say stuff about bitcoin.Sand Hill said on its website that "We accept everybody regardless of accreditation status," though Hall says that it "kept the general public on a waitlist" and was open only to "friends, family, and power users" for real-money trading.

As Paul Murphy put it at FT Alphaville, back in the glory days of Sand Hill, "What Sand Hill appear to have done is to simply sidestep the entire 40-year old edifice of the CFTC by using the blockchain, that bit of the Bitcoin infrastructure that acts as a distributed public ledger, for transactions."As I put it at the time, "Haha what?Just because you mumble the word 'blockchain' doesn't make otherwise illegal things legal."So, I mean, right, that.But the basic illegality of Sand Hill was covered in thick doughy layers of other, stranger illegality.For instance: The blockchain stuff was fake!From the SEC:Hall and Ou also told people that Sand Hill’s contracts were “smart contracts” or were created “on the blockchain” – the bitcoin database that records all transactions on the network.That was also not true.I had my doubts.A few weeks ago, Ou said -- in a Medium post that she quickly deleted, though Paul Murphy preserved it at FT Alphaville -- that, "Behind the scenes, we mapped out technology infrastructure to decentralize the exchange," but they never seem to have actually implemented it.But that still doesn't exhaust Sand Hill's goofy illegality.

Here's more from Ou's deleted post about the settlement :We listed sixty pre-IPO companies and signed our friends up as beta testers.Early orders sat unmatched in the order book.Nobody wants to play in a market with zero users, we realized.So we gave participants the illusion of liquidity.We created bots to trade against incoming orders.They were like my friends.I even named them!My favorite was the “Jesse Livermore” bot.Opportunistic to a fault.The bots would run every day and place orders against each other so the market looked like it was exhibiting lots of price movement and volume.For added credibility, we randomly generated trading histories for each company going all the way back to last year.So we had historical price and volume in addition to streaming quotes for chart data.We pasted descriptive text cribbed from the websites of banks and registered exchanges to make our website look like a serious business.Oh my lord, if you're going to create an illegal securities marketplace, don't also do manipulative trading in it!

Oh, but we only did the fake wash trades to trick real investors into doing real trades.Come on.So Sand Hill Exchange was shut down for its overdetermined illegality, though Hall continues "to operate Sand Hill Exchange without any real currency, so we may realize its full potential as an educational community."Onemight, at a stretch, take Sand Hill Exchange as a very silly story about some important themes.For instance, maybe it is a story about "smart contracts" and the use of the blockchain to transfer financial contracts other than bitcoins.I mean, it's not, since Sand Hill Exchange never actually used "smart contracts."Still, that is a thing, or might be.Real companies are looking into using the blockchain to transfer financial contracts -- Nasdaq, for instance, is testing a mechanism for trading shares of pre-IPO companies using the blockchain, much like Sand Hill Exchange was pretending to do.Or maybe Sand Hill is a story about the growing importance of private companies and private markets.

A lot of very big companies are not yet public; they do their capital raising in the private markets, accessing many of the same investors who invest in public companies.But there are important differences.Private markets are limited to "accredited investors," meaning relatively rich people and institutions, and so exclude small-time individual investors.If you think that private companies are the main engine of economic growth, then that seems unfair to the little guy.Private markets also tend to be limited to long investors: You can buy private-company shares, but you can't usually sell them short, which might contribute to bubbly overvaluation in the private markets.(This complaint is to some extent the opposite of the previous one.)A public prediction market, open to everyone, big and small, long and short, could solve both of those problems.The public prediction market could offer other advantages: Private markets tend to trade infrequently, and liquidation preferences mean that the headline valuations of big pre-IPO financing rounds can be misleading.

A prediction market could create more transparency about private-company valuations.Obviously Sand Hill didn't do that, and not just because Hall and Ou and Jesse Livermore were making up the prices.There's also this intriguing problem:There were almost no “short” investors to match with “long” investors.Sand Hill had no outside investors, auditors, or insurance.Instead, Sand Hill intended to rely on Hall and Ou to personally pay users who wanted to close out of a contract by reselling it or whose contract paid off based on a liquidity event.So, one, that is a terrible business model, mitigated only by the fact that they never did much business.But also it's a nice little micro-fact about our possible private-company tech bubble: Sand Hill, briefly and illegally, offered people the chance to short big private company valuations.And they mostly went long anyway.Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries.Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things.

Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future.My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems.The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits.The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated.Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting.The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do.