As more Taiwanese convenience stores have started accepting bitcoin transactions, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday said it would not regulate the management of the virtual currency.
The commission and the central bank have reached a consensus on viewing bitcoin as a commodity rather than a currency, so that the two agencies will keep their hands off bitcoin management, FSC Chairman William Tseng (曾銘宗) said on the sidelines of a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Finance Committee.
However, the commission will demand that local banks do not accept bitcoins for third-party receipts or payments, Tseng said.
Tseng’s remarks came after Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店), the nation’s second-largest convenience store operator, announced earlier yesterday plans to form a partnership with BitoEX Technology Co (幣託科技), a Taiwanese bitcoin wallet provider.
The partnership transforms bitcoins from a virtual wallet into coupons that can be used in nearly 3,000 FamilyMart stores.
BitoEX teamed up with FamilyMart and two smaller convenience store chains — Hi-Life International Co (萊爾富國際) and OK Mart Co (來來超商) — late last year to make bitcoin purchases available in local convenience stores.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto as an alternative to government-run monetary systems, and was released in 2009 as an open-source software.
It is controlled by an international network of computers and can be used to buy goods and services, traded for traditional currency on a bitcoin exchange, or stored in a virtual wallet.
The central bank last year said that bitcoin is a highly speculative virtual product and lacks a mechanism to protect transactions.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts