first published on Core Media on 2017.04.27
The first cryptocurrency developed in Japan, Monacoin, has surpassed the SegWit activation threshold.
Born from the depths of 2ch, Japan's most popular text board, in the December of 2013, the Monacoin community has become the backbone of the cryptocurrency community in Japan. As a result of SegWit's activation, hopes for further developments, including some off-chain solutions, are beginning to rise within the Monacoin community.
Moreover, the perception of cryptocurrency by the Japanese public is gradually improving, thanks to the involvement of big businesses and the Financial Services Agency. Now that there are proper venues for registration, cryptocurrencies can be officially recognized by the government, which helps to significantly reduce the barrier to entry to crypto for Japanese developers. With this combination of new and existing crypto developers, we're all hoping for a significant increase in various crypto-related activity.
Now, let's take a look at what makes Monacoin stand out!
First of all, there's a couple things you should know about Japanese internet culture. Japanese online communities have been and will always be overflowing with creativity. They've conceived MAD, BM98 and Hatsune Miku/MMD, to name a few, and their accessible nature naturally led to the formation of decentralized communities.
To allegorize, Japanese internet culture is like a fountain of creativity: creative movements continuously gush and flow out one after the other. Mona is one of the memes that have spawned from within that circulation and is one that motivates people to kindle movements by looking back on former movements.
Of course, these communities have had their share of problems.
The repository of assets born from their creativity were sometimes used in ways unacceptable to their creators or exploited for wrongful personal gain and, to fight these sorts of issues, middlemen who lacked transparency and credibility were often needed to manage access to these assets.
As a result of prioritizing an explosive rate of creativity, time-consuming protective measures were hardly exercised. Even now, no single person has a clear picture as to how this repository of assets may have been used and who all may have ungainfully benefited from them.
Cryptocurrency technology could possibly generate new solutions for these issues. There are already some projects that target creative assets, such as DECENT and SingularDTV. A Japan-specific one might come along in the future as well.
Ultimately, we will attain trustless, frictionless and decentralized management technology for creative assets. When Japanese creatives adopt these sorts of technology and improve their liquidity, a new movement should naturally arise.
For assets to sustain their value, they must continuously be utilized. For that reason, investors will research to the best of their ability to gather information on them.
Similarly, in order to sustain creativity, one must continuously utilize their assets. That is especially why we need currency that focuses on sustaining creativity.
That's what the Monacoin community have set out to achieve and is what makes Monacoin stand out. 2ch, AskMona and Twitter have provided facilities for micropayments and small-scale crowdfunding campaigns which, in practice, have been used to support creators.
The main thing to keep in mind is that pairing creative activities with these new technologies will each bring novel experiences. Crypto-token will be one of the components for those kinds of experiences in this space. Off-chain solutions as well will open up a cornucopia of possibilities. Continuing to explore solutions like the ones described is the only way we can work to preserve creativity.
I hope that as the Monacoin community matures, it'll give birth to a new creative movement that will take the world by its reigns.
English version creator - lae @sleepingkyoto
Japanese draft version - ima @Nxtima1