Viewpoint 丨 Can blockchain restore Japan's lost two decades?

2. Ordinary banks are generally divided into urban banks, local banks, and trust banks. For example, Mitsubishi Bank that you usually see, Mitsui Sumitomo Bank falls into this category.

3. Small and medium-sized financial institutions. Here are some credit vaults and credit combinations, similar to the state of Chinese cooperatives. They are a historical product, but they still exist.

4. Agricultural, forestry and fishery financial institutions, similar to the above 3, are a special existence, agricultural synergy and fishery synergy. A proper analogy is that 3 is the land and urban version, and 4 is the agricultural and fishery version of the cooperative.

5. There are many securities and financial institutions, the most famous of which are Nomura Securities, etc. There are more than 200 first-class securities companies in Japan, more than 2,000 second-class securities companies, and other securities companies. These securities companies are also the most active outside of the aforementioned banks.

6. Insurance companies also belong to financial institutions, such as Mitsui Marine Insurance and Sumitomo Life Insurance.

7. NoBank, this category belongs to P2P companies similar to China, as well as credit card companies, money lenders, financial leasing companies, and other non-bank non-securities and non-insurance financial companies are included here, including the now popular Tripartite payments also belong here.

8. Government financial institutions, Japan Policy Finance Treasury, Japan Policy Investment Bank, etc., similar to China's National Development Bank and Belt and Road Bank, banks that implement national policy financial functions.

Among the above-mentioned major financial institutions, they are extremely eager for financial innovation. There have been two major shocks from China and the world. One is the QR code scanning of Alipay, which has become popular in Japan. Yes, but QR payment is the most NB in ​​China), the other is the blockchain. All major financial institutions hope to carry out financial innovation through foreign technologies and solutions to solve the problem of industrial aging. Hope to overtake the curve.

Here are two of the most representative examples. One is PayPay, which appeared as the ace QR payment of Sun Zhengyi Softbank Group, which basically swept the Japanese QR payment market. The other is the BitFlyer digital asset exchange, which directly opens the yen to digital asset transactions. Unlike some places that require one conversion with OTC and various stable currencies, it directly trades yen to BTC.

In addition to these two heads, other large, medium and small companies are actively carrying out various financial innovations. With the outbreak of 5G in Japan in 2020, many good projects will emerge in the visible range.

Refer to the companies in the STO Association established by the SBI just mentioned. It can be seen that major Japanese companies are actively willing to embrace blockchain financial innovation.

Many active or retired officials will mention blockchain in the conference speech, giving the impression that "Japanese officials know and welcome blockchain." What do you think of this phenomenon?

Although not like China, Japan does not have the above book, but Japanese officials are basically studying hard, trying to learn the blockchain overnight, and giving some chestnuts, members of the Japanese parliament have become at least three virtual currencies Alliance, pull each other, join. A new type of currency is being used by members of the House of Representatives, Naoya Takemoto, members of the House of Representatives, and members of the House of Representatives Kiyoshi Kihara, and members of the House of Representatives Hiroyuki Hirai. These three were established in 2018, and the follow-up continues. Retired government officials in active service often talk about blockchain related matters on official and unofficial occasions, which is already the norm. Please refer to a video of Libra in the US Congress about Libra. I remember the original words probably want to express this meaning: if we do n’t do it, China will do it, and we wo n’t be able to catch up later, this sentence Words also apply to Japan.

Insert a picture here to describe this background situation. The yellow lines are the United States, blue Japan, and red China. We know that China's GDP exceeds that of Japan. This is an indisputable fact. But what happened within five years, not only exceeded, it was doubled! What does it feel like? Yesterday, the two children were more than one meter high, and everyone was on par. Today they met, good guy, two meters! Don't look up, you can't see it! This is Japan's condensed feeling of China's development. Some Japanese who are unwilling to look up simply can't see China's development, and some can see China's development, so hurry up, while China is still banning virtual currency, hurry up, catch up, legislative protection, Endorsement of policies, do your best!

This is how I look at this phenomenon. (Purely personal)

Let's take a look at this PDF file. This is an electronic manual issued by the Japanese Finance Agency to the general public. From the overall word, you can see that the Japanese Government Finance Agency released to the public: speculation, no problem, please look for legal institutions! Make money, no problem, legal tax payment prohibits money laundering!

The openness and friendliness of digital currencies are from top to bottom and are consistent across the country. As a developed country, the Japanese people have a relatively large investment capacity and demand.

There are two huge potential purchasing powers in this world. The first is that there are "Chinese aunts" who can directly control the trend of the gold market. The second is that the investment commonly known as "Mrs. Watanabe" in Japan can control the foreign exchange market.

After Japanese women get married and have children, most of them do not work at home. "Mrs. Watanabe" refers to these 50-70-year-olds. Her husband has a successful career, the child has grown up, the money saved, the investment is rampant, what good projects How about it? real estate? When the bubble economy collapsed last time, you could lose money, stocks? The pants that fell during the financial crisis are gone. This huge force is slowly entering the digital asset industry.

Watanabe's investment is not a blind act, they will learn to manage it (not to say that Japanese uncles and young people do not speculate in coins), but that Watanabe's wives have more "household financial rights". The power of domestic affairs accounts for a large proportion of the country's GDP, so this force cannot be underestimated. And normal Japanese men are also investing in digital assets.

As for young people, it has been developed that some companies directly pay BTC for their wages (you can choose whether you want BTC or JPY) and there are not a few. If you don't buy coins, you won't be fashionable anymore. You will buy more or less.

Unlike the crazy gambling nature of South Korea, Japan is a benign development under government supervision and government promotion.

Please take a look at this set of pictures. This set of pictures is a full process photo of an iPhone case that I bought using an offline store using BTC. This group of pictures was taken a year ago, exactly a year ago, on December 15, 2018, what kind of state does BTC make up in Japan? . In addition, in order to meet the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Japan plans to increase its cashless settlement ratio to 40% within 10 years, and Japan has legalized Bitcoin payments last year, so this has created a peculiar phenomenon. Cognitively, cash-> aggregate payment-> digital currency payment should be developed gradually, but after Japan has passed the first step, they are parallel in the second and third steps: cash-> QRpay + BTC.

However, we can see that a world that does not require bank deposits is coming. In this way, the traditional charging model of banks will be difficult to sustain, and the pressure to use blockchain to cut costs will conflict with the interests of vested interests. In the field of fiat currency, the vested interests are very powerful, and digital currencies will threaten their survival, so how to survive the intermediary agencies is the main problem they are facing now.

Finally share a picture, the Internet is an information revolution, and Blockchain is a value revolution!