When the founder or founders of bitcoin decided to use the name Satoshi Nakamoto they virtually guaranteed that Asia, and especially Japan, would be the epicentre of the cryptocurrency craze. Japan has led the world by legitimising the phenomenon through regulation. As a result, there are now more than 3.5m Japanese cryptocurrency traders and the country accounts for about 40 per cent of global bitcoin trading.
The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume is called Binance and was started by Chinese technology entrepreneur Zhao Changpeng. In February, Forbes magazine put Mr Zhao on its cover and said he claimed he had built a fortune of up to $2bn in seven months.
Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have plummeted since then, but such tales of wealth creation in the region have attracted the type of get-rich-quick operators you might expect. My colleagues in Asia and I now receive scores of emails every week promoting cryptocurrencies for farmers, for people with no internet access, for people who worry about privacy. There is even a photo on Chinese chat groups of a room full of people in yoga poses attending a “Buddhist blockchain wealth forum”.