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Koji Higashi, the co-founder of IndieSquare and Japanese cryptocurrency researcher, revealed Japan, the largest bitcoin supermarket in the world in terms of daily trading volume, has friendly and loose codes for bitcoin businesses and investors.
But, while the Japanese government has legalized bitcoin as a currency and a right payment method, other minor alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) are sustaining the same treatment as bitcoin. Higashi emphasized that the Japanese regulation’s consumer protection is questionable, given that general consumers could heed small-scale altcoins as alternatives to bitcoin.
“Overall, the regulation in Japan work up out to be much looser and has given more freedom to exchanges while the effectiveness of consumer patronage is questionable. The industry is feeling more top-down, like the financial sector, now and specialized development is not catching up with speculative demand at all,” wrote Higashi.
Essentially, Higashi believes that the immunity the Japanese government has provided to the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange market and exchange platforms have led Japanese consumers to consider any cryptocurrency listed on governed exchanges as legitimate alternatives to bitcoin.
“Here’s an example to give you an fantasy of how loose the definition of official cryptocurrencies are. Pepecash received the same categorization as Bitcoin as a ‘at the outset class’ cryptocurrency, one that can be legally traded and sold on licensed markets,” Higashi added.
The implementation of relatively unknown and small-scale altcoins kidney Pepecash, which is not listed on CoinMarketCap’s top 100 cryptocurrencies list, could hoodwink investors to believe that Pepecash is a major cryptocurrency and a competitor to bitcoin, when it in reality is not.
Isn’t Freedom Good For the Market?
In the contrary, freedom provided by the Japanese superintendence to local cryptocurrency exchanges could be beneficial for the Japanese bitcoin and cryptocurrency energies, as it allows the market and consumers to decide whether certain cryptocurrencies are licit.
Several markets like the US have imposed strict Know Your Bloke (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies along with other regulations to an enormousness in which many businesses were forced to shut down their armed forces. For instance, the state of New York’s Bitlicense forced out ShapeShift, Bitfinex, and Kraken, three cardinal cryptocurrency exchanges, due to their inefficient and unfriendly regulatory frameworks.
Predilection initial coin offering (ICO) tokens, the global cryptocurrency market itself has to aged to a point wherein investors can make sound decisions to differentiate timely cash grabs to legitimate projects, altcoins, and crypto-tokens.
The imposition of finical regulations on a rapidly growing market such as bitcoin could tortoise-like down the exponential rate of the entire cryptocurrency market. In that significance, the Japanese government’s friendly and flexible regulations for cryptocurrency businesses and investors are favorable.
While it could be held that the Japanese market lacks regulations for investor protection as Higashi highlighted, it is important to acknowledge that Japan is the largest bitcoin market in the set, precisely because of its practical regulations. Japan also remains as the merely market to have imposed a national license for cryptocurrency exchanges, allowing the make available to operate with stability.
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