This article first appeared in Connect magazine
October edition.
Virtual currencies divide opinion. You can see them as a
currency or an investment; as the next big thing or the next big
bubble; as an unfathomable mystery or a familiar part of everyday
life in 2016. What you can't deny is that they're booming,
and heading into the mainstream.
In the first half of this year, around $4.25 billion in bitcoin
was traded in Japan – that's up around 50 times on the
previous year. A recent study from Juniper Research has speculated
that transaction values may triple to $92 billion this year.
The question of what to do about that, and how to seize the
opportunity, is one that falls not just on lawyers, tech firms and
service providers, but also on governments and regulators, who have
to strike a fine and careful balance between effective oversight
and control, and allowing innovation and experimentation in this
fast-developing new area to go ahead.
