I think I have answered the first question in other comments. Please take a loot.

Is there a decent quantity of restaurants and merchants that will accept, and you could live off of just bitcoin for a while (larger cities only).

-> I'd say it'd be difficult to live off Bitcoin in Tokyo. Sure, it's not possible but there aren't enough variety of restaurants that accept Bitcoin thus I wouldn't recommend doing it.

Good question.

I'm hoping it'll become the easiest way for beginners to get their first bitcoins.

Currently in Japan, there is very few way to buy or get bitcoins without going through KYC'd exchanges. One of the reasons is strict regulation around custody, credit card purchase etc. An exchange license is required to offer any of those services.

In other words, something like ZBD, Fold, Fountain and any other custodial Lightning services are unpractical to offer in Japan and the whole ecosystem heavily relies on exchanges in Japan.

With Diamond Wallet and ‘sats4ads’ concept, while everything is still non-custodial, users can get their first sats easily by viewing ads without KYC in advance. This type of non-custodial satsback scheme didn't exist before and we suspect that's what was missing for Lightning adoption in Japan.

Diamond Wallet is still work in progress, so no real surprise yet to be honest.

But the initial tester reaction in Japan has been pretty good and we're a bit surprised about how active and consistent people are about stacking small amount of sats by viewing ads.

The other thing is more about Greenlight and Breez SDK. They're really great tools and helping us save a lot of developer time and troubles for building a self-custodial solution.

With that said, Lightning payments on greenlight would still take a long time to go through (20-30 seconds) and there is still a lot of improvement needed for UX that is good enough for casual users. But building a good non-custodial service takes time and we knew this already.

Oh this is a very good but big question. I will think about it and maybe answer a bit later

The base fee should be the same for DH Swap and Boltz. The actual fee difference likely come from the routing fee. But we're planning to sunset DH Swap soon unfortunately and we recommend using Boltz.

Thanks for trying out DH Swap though! Our resources are limited and we need to focus on wallet development and others, but I still really like the idea of many nodes offering swap services, compete against each other or aggregate liquidity.

We can talk more about this directly later lol

But in general, there is a steep language barrier for Japanese people and if you really try to attract more people from Japan, you may need to create a Japanese language section or something.

We also have a similar concept website in Japan called spotlight and some people use it write blog posts etc. FYI.

Right now, as it's an experiment, I'm personally paying for the ads myself to promote the wallet and reward early testers. We're also in talk with other bitcoiners/potential advertisers and we plan to eventually have more external businesses funding it obviously.

We will also support credit card subscription for channel opening and receiving ads rewards. With this model, we won't have to rely on external businesses to fund the ads and practically help people get sats without KYC.

The business model for Diamond Wallet is still in works but I believe I can come up with something sustainable.

I have already answered some of your questions here

For others,

"I heard from people who went to Japan that there is almost to no stores who accept bitcoin"

We actually have enough stores that accept Lightning in Tokyo. Check out BTC Map and you will see some options in Tokyo.

Btw, the reason why merchant adoption in Japan is still very slow is mostly an unfavorable tax system on crypto. Unless we have some sort of tax exemption of small amount of bitcoin payments, most people won't use Bitcoin as a payment imo.

"doing a meetup there with other Noderunners who will join me to Japan?"

-> Absolutely. Join the Diamond Hands telegram group and let me know when you visit Japan.

"how is the inflation? Are people feeling it?"

-> Inflation and yen depreciation is a really big issue now in Japan and people are finally really feeling its pain now. I mean I have most of wealth in Bitocin myself and more or less protected, but I still feel the pain of weak yen and inflation.

I sometimes wonder how most people are making ends meet or why people are still not mad at the government or about the weak yen. If this was in other countries, we'd already be seeing riots on the street already!

Online- join us on the Diamond Hands telegram group and that's where most serious bitcoiners are. (English speakers are also welcome)

Offline- Diamond Hands also organizes some meetups and events occasionally. Also Tokyo Bitcoin Hackers aka Tokyo Bitdevs host more technical meetups for English speakers.

Fulgur Japan also recently announced a physical "Bitcoin hub" in Tokyo and it actually looks amazing. I think this will be the go-to physical place for both local and international bitcoiners to meet in the future. I'm pretty excited about the hub as well.

Mark is still in Japan, but he's never been very involved with the local community. It's not like he's not welcome, but most people in the industry now don't even know who he is, I guess.

Yes, I actually have been in contact with the Korean bitcoin scene since 2017 and understand the Korean ecosystem better than many.

Korea and Japan have a lot of similarities such as active traders, conservative culture, love for altcoins etc...

With that said, there are interesting differences between the two in my opinion.

Korea is a bit more international/Americanized than Japan in general. Leaders in the crypto community are often bi-lingual or Koreans who grew up overseas. This gives more advantages for Koreans to keep up with the latest trends in the English speaking world and compete internationally.

On the other hand, Japan is a bit more detached from the English speaking world and English proficiency is weaker, which makes difficult for international projects to enter the Japanese market.

The key advantage for Japan is that it has developer culture and a group of people who purely enjoy playing with new technologies beyond profit making. Hence, we manage to bootstrap a very active routing community with Diamond Hands, and now the same group of people are very excited about BitAxe, a DIY solo miner.

BitAxe, for example, won't make you any money but a number of people in the Bitcoin community in Japan are excited about playing with this new toy, understanding mining better and contributing to the network. This type of culture gives an edge to Japan in terms of creativity and innovations in my opinion.

On the other hand, I see less movement like this in Korea and people seem to be more pragmatic or less interested in things that don't make economic sense. It's reasonable but it's probably more difficult to build and maintain a Bitcoin community with strong culture in Korea.

Ah no good answer here. I haven't met him in person obviously, but I have to go with the one and only Satoshi Nakamoto.

Ah it's tough to choose and I actually couldn't listen to everything myself unfortunately (too busy taking care of a bunch of other stuff in the background during the conference)

But I think "Surviving the 2021 Myanmar Coup: How the Military Orange-Pilled Me" offered a unique perspective and seem to leave a big impression on others as well.

Also, it's not a talk, but the Lightning Marche on Day2 did a kickass job and it impressed a lot of international bitcoiners with unique products and experiences.

We're gathering Lightning sales sats now but we had more than 20000 USD worth in Lightning transactions from the Marche alone.

How did you weather the large number of force-closes during the fee-hikes caused by Ordinal bullshit?

-> Oh it was ugly for us as well. We improved our HTLC monitoring environment and mitigated the issue a bit, but still it sucked a big time and we lost some money due to FCs, too. I was crying in my heart lol

How do you see the future of running a LN routing node for amateurs? Will it become solely suitable for people doing it full-time job?

-> Seems it's becoming more and more of the latter now.

On the other hand, it's still not very professional just yet and individual node runners still have hope for profitable routing experience in my opinion. Tools around automative channel creations or liquidity management via different swap services need to improve further though.

We manage Diamond Hands node to this day, though not as active now compared to in the past.

The initial impression of it is just something new and stimulating. I really felt excited about more and more new nodes popping up and we were at the forefront of the emerging Lightning economy. At the time, we didn't really have any financial motive and routing was more of intellectual curiosity for us, but it was all fun.

Now, as we need to work on other stuff including event planning, wallet development, B2B development etc, we cannot spare as much time on it unfortunately.

I think the biggest difference is that routing node management is becoming more and more professional and it's getting more and more difficult for individual small node runners now, which was sort of expected anyways.

With that said, now the conference is over, we're planning to assign a bit more resources on routing again and look deeper into it. It's not 100% yet, but the DH node may make a nice comeback in the routing world soon.

I believe you mean DH Swap. Unfortunately, we are now getting ready to sunset it as we're lacking resources to actively maintain it. But we just used Boltz API for that.

The Boltz team has been doing a really great job in the Lightning ecosystem by the way. I love what they are doing.

What kind of places in which cities accept Bitcoin?

-> It's actually improving now and there are more than handful places in Tokyo which accept Lightning payments. My favorite is Cocorotus' kitchen cars across Tokyo. They sell delicious bento for Lightning and I recommend checking them out when you visit Japan.

The thing is merchant adoption in Japan were very limited before, but over the last year or so, we started doing a better job organizing pop-up shops and Bitcoiners selling goods and services for Bitcoin themselves, rather than trying to convince regular merchants, who're not interested or persistent enough.

The Lightning Marche, which was also a huge success during Bitcoin Tokyo 2024 is also a key driver for this movement and we've got some coverage by a national newspaper earlier this year as well.

I actually think now is better than ever before in Japan.

The thing about the Mt. Gox and/or Roger Ver era was that they were not connected to the local Japanese community.

In addition, Mt. Gox and Roger kind of did damage to Bitcoin reputations for locals in some sense. The Mt.Gox losing a lot of Bitcoins became a national scandal and people laughed at Bitcoin and Mark Karpeles etc. Roger's promotion of Bitcoin is also a bit eccentric and too much for Japanese people, who are more conservative and authoritative, too. He also started to promote Bitcoin Cash later on, which also created more confusion than good.

In that sense, even though there seemed to have lots of stuff happening in Japan in early days from English speakers' point of view, there was actually not much happening in terms of local activities and real adoption before.

Obviously we have more locals involved now compared to before and there are more hard-core local bitcoiners and some companies are deep into Bitcoin, too.

lots to work on but positive signs emerging as of late.

Yuya Ogawa

Co-founder and CTO of Diamond Hands. He's the tech guy for Diamond Hands and is responsible for developing of Diamond Wallet etc. He's kind of low-profile but he's built a lot of interesting Lightning products in the past.

Kishin Kato

The up-and-coming Bitcoin and Lightning developer from Japan. He's getting more active outside Japan recently and I'd expect he'll make name for himself in the future.

He also did a great job moderating and speaking on multiple sessions at Bitcoin Tokyo.

Teruko Neriki

She works for Fulgur Japan and she's also a co-organizer of Bitcoin Tokyo 2024. She's also known as the Japanese translator of Bitcoin Standard and other Bitcoin related books.

Joe MIyamoto

A solid Bitcoin developer and also a funny guy from Japan. He now works for a local exchange but seems to be suffering from working on non-Bitcoin related stuff. Somebody save him!