Will Bitcoin be New Legal Tender in Japan?

Bitcoin hasn’t been around all that long, but already, it’s represented some major surprises to the world as we know it.

It’s been an investment vehicle—it’s made some early adopters rich—it’s spawned a host of imitators and it’s delivered some interesting marketing shakeups as stores like Overstock.com accept it for goods and services.

One of the biggest changes bitcoin has ever seen, however, may be poised to strike as Japan mulls the possibility of allowing it as legal tender in the country.

The Liberal Democratic party in Japan is currently considering the laws around virtual currencies—which are currently defined as commodities like gold, pork bellies or orange juice—to make these into an actual currency.

The new change would turn anything that could be exchanged for goods and services into a currency, which could raise some issues, particularly as far as the notion of barter goes.

This won’t happen any time soon, however; financial affairs official Tomonori Kanda noted there was “…a long way to go” before changes were made, though discussions have taken place and a general consensus suggests that this may be the right way to proceed.

Such a change would be huge, not just for Japan, but also for bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. If Japan accepted it as legal tender, would it be long before every other nation would need to follow suit just to keep up? It would likely end up needing a FOREX listing, and could be traded in like any other.

It would also likely make it easier to convert bitcoin to other currencies; a bitcoin miner wanting regular cash from most any country would likely be able to convert bitcoin to yen, and then yen to anything else.

If that were the case, how long before the middleman would be removed for sheer expediency’s sake, and then anyone could trade in bitcoin like any other currency? Would the sudden demand for bitcoin as a kind of universal exchange platform make it more valuable?

There’s a lot of possibility connected to such a move, so it’s one that bears watching. Japan may well be the first step to bitcoin’s entry into mainstream society, and though it won’t happen for a while, it may be huge when it finally does.