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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet said on Friday that bitcoin, the world’s most well-known form of virtual money, is not a currency, but would be taxable.
Tokyo defined bitcoin as a product that is not handled by banks and securities houses. It also added that consumption tax would be levied on purchases of the virtual currency and income tax would be imposed on profits from its sale.
The decision came a week after the collapse of the Tokyo-based Mt Gox, one of the largest exchanges for the virtual currency.
The collapse prompted Japanese lawmakers to argue bitcoin should be under greater public control.
Mt Gox said it had lost 750,000 of its customers’ bitcoins and 100,000 of its own. It reportedly put the total loss at about half a billion dollars.
Bitcoins have attracted growing attention among investors throughout the world since trading in them began in 2009, mainly because of the ease of using digital money in cross-border transactions.
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