Kind of a sad day in Japan for bitcoin and cryptos in general.  

Why such the high compliance fees?  It seems there are lots of scams to an uneducated public and the government wants to really curb that.

And then we all know about Mt Gox.

Japan has been dominating lately in BTC volume, looks to over 50% at the moment!
https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/btc/analysis/USD?type=Currencies

Wonder how this ties in with that ...

No information about who is on the list other than Tokens and IOU are banned - meaning definitely no MaidSafe, Iconomi, Augur and other projects which have gone in & out of the top 10 - top 20.  I can agree with this because almost all Tokens and IOUs seem to be vaporware scams.

I will be surprised if they end up permitting Monero and Dashcoin, since their use and promotion on the darknet isn't a secret anymore.

In terms of usage, XEM is actually used more than Ethereum and Litecoin but the pessimist in me assumes the bureaucrat in charge of the list will only look at exchange volume (which are often whales trading to themselves) and not any other metrics in deciding who gets on the list.

Unless things have since changed, I can't imagine Kraken remaining in Japan because most of their user base has been European for the longest time and relocating to Japan, from California, was done for taxation reasons and the perception at the time that they were lasseiz faire (due to allowing MtGox in the first place).

Japan is still arguably "2011" in terms of local adoption and interest in blockchain.   I think it's just going to be large exchanges like BitFlyer, organizations like BCCC (if they can convince their members to gather up $500,000) and some medium sized entities who will remain in Japan.

Thing is there isn't much information about this volume.  Japan is dominating in volume but there doesn't really seem to be a surge in local adoption or Japanese becoming more influential within the blockchain world.  This seems to be high speculation by a few people or maybe even Japanese firms doing it.

Coinmap only indicates 53 places in Tokyo are accepting Bitcoin and that doesn't mean they're doing daily transactions either.

I am amazed that they didn't do this much sooner, looks like they are starting to see the potentials of crypto(bitcoin) they know what will happen 10-20 years from now, which is bitcoin with a market cap of +$500B, thus trying to get ahead of everything and to have some sort of control over the money flow.

Potential? They basically want to regulate cryptocurrency by hindering any business related projects. What company will be able to met these ridiculous requirements?
Do you know that New York is practically a blank spot on map of crypto companies? It is because they have draconian BitLicense. Japan will be black hole of cryptocurrency.

Expect more to come in the next months and years. It kinda looks governments are trying to fight it back by regulating Bitcoin up to the hilt. I'm curious if this kind of "licensing" actually means prohibition of Bitcoin in Japan. What folks from Japan are saying? I think they should be more aware of and familiar with the situation in regard to real intentions of the Japanese government

What does it mean to Bitcoin in Japan?

to be honest with you i can't believe it is a true estimate of the situation. specially about the prices. i can not agree that a bitcoin related license registration can cost 300,000 to 500,000 dollar while any other license registration would only cost somewhere around 50 to 700 dollar!

how they are going to prevent monero to be used, you don't need to sell soem altcoin, you can use them in the deep web and who receive will sell in his country, they cannot regulate this in any way

they can only regulate exchange not altcoin directly, it will be fun when decentralized exchange maybe built in wallet will be all over the place....