Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

news.bitcoin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 125 posts

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#31

Post by csomar »

I'm not sure if this is news or not.

You can pay for anything you can buy online (PayPal, Skrill and most payment processors) and with Credit Card using Bitcoin.

In fact, you can create virtual credit cards with bitcoin without any verification for amounts smaller than $2,500.

However, here is the catch: It comes with around 5-10% premium to the Bitcoin spot prices on major exchanges (Coinbase, circle, etc..)

So unless you are buying with something like Gemini (where bank transfers are free) and you are not getting any premium on the bitcoin price, this is not a novelty.

I don't know how accessible Bitcoin is for Japanese consumers; and how much it'd cost (premium over spot) to buy it. But if it is, indeed, easy; this can be huge.

If you are a heavy consumer (say $5,000 per month), 5% will make around $250/month in savings, or $3,000/year. That's something worth the hassle.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#32

Post by nicky0 »

automatwon wrote: post #18
nicky0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#33

Post by nicky0 »

joosters wrote: post #14
nicky0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be convenient if you have an income [...] in Bitcoin. Miners, drug dealers, and who else exactly?

Granted, it's a niche.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#34

Post by TorKlingberg »

xedarius wrote: post #16

A friend of mine who lives in Tokyo told me that in Japan it's near impossible to transfer money from one bank to another. He told me the way Japanese people transfer money between banks was to draw the cash out in one and pay it in to another. I'm prepared to be corrected if this tale isn't true. However, with this in mind, it seems like quite a leap from a non-electronic intra-bank system to Bitcoin. On the other h…

I don't know about transfer between banks, but I do remember that when I left Japan in 2007 I withdrew all my money in cash, walked to the post office, and sent it to my Swedish bank. That saved me several days and a whole lot of transfer fees.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#35

Post by andy_ppp »

In Japan right now and hardly anywhere seems to take card. It's a very cash focused society in my opinion, but really it's impossible to tell what would make sense to Japanese people, everything here can feel almost deliberately contrary at times; they eat KFC on Christmas day, all the locks turn anti-clockwise to open and people aren't fat despite massive amounts of refined carbs.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#37

Post by dennist »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #30

I keep hearing about Bitcoin being used to pay for commodities, but will this actually ever scale? With a maximum transaction rate of ~3.5 transactions per second, won't any practical application of Bitcoin for the masses eventually have to be implemented by a bunch of trusted third parties operating off the blockchain and bundling transactions? At that point, we seem to be back to using credit card companies who jus…

You may me right that there might have to be third parties for scalability. But depending on how this is done, you might not have to trust them in order to use them (in the worst case, they could refuse your transactions or delay them but not steal your money). So you might give up some privacy and rely a little on third parties for lower transaction fees or speed, but as long as everything is still using the blockchain you'd still have the choice to transact without a third party if you're willing to pay the premium for it (perhaps large or international remittances).

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#38

Post by dennist »

andy_ppp wrote: post #35

In Japan right now and hardly anywhere seems to take card. It's a very cash focused society in my opinion, but really it's impossible to tell what would make sense to Japanese people, everything here can feel almost deliberately contrary at times; they eat KFC on Christmas day, all the locks turn anti-clockwise to open and people aren't fat despite massive amounts of refined carbs.

Really? I use my credit card for maybe 70% of my spendings. It's true you absolutely need to have cash on you for the occasions when you can't use it but I can buy a 30 yen chocolate bar in every convenience store here. Compare that to Germany where I think no supermarket takes credit cards and even to use electronic cash you have to spend a minimum amount.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#39

Post by Fuxy »

hkmurakami wrote: post #8
nicky0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin

#40

Post by adrianN »

dennist wrote: post #38
andy_ppp wrote: post #35

In Japan right now and hardly anywhere seems to take card. It's a very cash focused society in my opinion, but really it's impossible to tell what would make sense to Japanese people, everything here can feel almost deliberately contrary at times; they eat KFC on Christmas day, all the locks turn anti-clockwise to open and people aren't fat despite massive amounts of refined carbs.

Really? I use my credit card for maybe 70% of my spendings. It's true you absolutely need to have cash on you for the occasions when you can't use it but I can buy a 30 yen chocolate bar in every convenience store here. Compare that to Germany where I think no supermarket takes credit cards and even to use electronic cash you have to spend a minimum amount.

Almost every German supermarket takes credit cards usually without a minimum amount. I use mine to pay for almost everything.
Post reply on HN