A year after the Japanese government recognized cryptocurrency as a legal form of money, bitcoin payments are steadily going mainstream. Bic Camera is one of the most profitable electronic, cosmetic and duty-free goods stores in Japan. It has now revealed that even though less than 1% of payments have been made in BTC since it started accepting bitcoin last year, the number of Japanese bitcoin spenders is slowly and steadily increasing, it observed.
Also read: Media Frenzy in Japan as Bic Camera Starts Accepting Bitcoin
Bic Camera’s Year-Long Relationship with BTC
Bic Camera started taking bitcoin in a limited capacity shortly after the Japanese government came up with new regulations around digital currencies and the exchanges that are handling them in April 2017. In an interview with news.Bitcoin.com, Masanari Matsumoto, Bic Camera’s PR and IR Chief, revealed that the average bitcoin spenders were younger Japanese males.
“When Bic Camera first installed the Bitcoin payment system in its stores, we expected that the customers paying in Bitcoin would mostly be foreigners,” he said. But it turned out to be quite different. “We noticed that Bitcoin was becoming very popular. Then the government announced that Bitcoin was officially legal, so we finally felt more comfortable introducing Bitcoin as a method of payment in our stores,” Matsumoto explained. “Bic Camera always aims at responding to its customers’ demands, and there was a huge demand at the time.”
When Bic Camera started taking BTC in April of 2017 at two of its largest stores in central Tokyo, they noticed an increase in demand from customers. They later expanded the option in their entire 40 stores nationwide and conducted a test overall to study who was using bitcoin. The results of this research showed that the Japanese sales were higher than
