41–50 of 125 posts
Here we go again, I'm learning yet another "Japan is weird/oddly advanced" thing from a non-Japanese source... I believe all Westerners want Japan to be weird and perverted. ALL of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Germany is against credit, rather than electronic transactions.
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…
Well as you suspected that is not true. Maybe your friend doesn't understand his bank interface? If anything the Japanese use bank transfer(furikomi) more than in the west because credit cards are less used.
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.
Very few tourist attractions and restaurants take card payments.
(Incidentally, this is where Vitalik Buterin, author of Ethereum, resides).
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…
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?