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I doubt white tourists are subjected to any harassment, but two weeks ago someone I know was told she had to pay 10,000 baht as “entry fee”, she managed to get it down to 2,000 baht. They would not allow her to enter Thailand, if she did not pay. This was in Suvarnabhumi, and she did not already have a visa.

What did you do with the savings from the reduced rate during COVID? We’ve btw had a couple of employees who didn’t want to pay social security fund contribution.

I don’t think he wants to understand. He made money on crypto by being early, and now he thinks that everyone can make money from a zero-sum game, even though all the coins he has recommended are down and some of the staking services recommended in these threads turned out to be unsustainable, with many people losing all what they had staked. It’s baffling to me that a community which has DYOR as a mantra and think skeptics are just to old to understand crypto, does not grasp even basic principles like how you can’t create money without underlying economic activity — they literally think they have invented the perpetual motion machine, and skeptics are just bitter for having missed the boat, not realizing that even this statement (which has often been said on this forum) indicates that there are no gains to be had for those late to the (pyramid) scheme. And yet, they still don’t see it… As for what lead up to the $69,000 per bitcoin, Amy Castor has a good writeup titled How 2020 set the stage for the 2021 bitcoin bubble.

Depends on who you ask. The security of bitcoin is proportional to number of miners. I personally think it is a completely flawed model, which I have elaborated on in the past, i.e. if you receive $100M worth of BTC you want to make sure that it cost more than that to “take over” the network (e.g. bribe miners and/or startup enough servers to have majority), as those who sent you $100M might otherwise spend less to allow a double-spend. Though nobody cares about BTC for actually transferring value, all that matters is buying and selling the tokens on centralized exchanges and hope that there are enough new buyers to make the price go up ????

You can get a debit card associated with your Wise account, that way, you can just use that card for expenses when traveling, and enjoy the better exchange rate (without needing a local bank account). Also, as it is a multi-currency account, you can accept USD, EUR, JPY, etc. on your Wise account and keep them in that currency. Of course this is mainly if you know that you will need to spend the money later — e.g. I have expenses in USD and I also receive some income in USD, but I no longer have a US bank account, so I could in theory just use Wise for that. Though these days I use Revolut for this stuff, since it is a real bank and has some other advantages, plus slightly better exchange rate on pretty much all but THB.

There is no fee transferring money into your Wise account. There is however a fee when you transfer it out of your account, but this somewhat matches the fee for doing a cross-border transfer. As for using the debit card: Yes, there is a percentage added to the rate (for foreign currency), for me this has averaged out to be 0.44% compared to the ECB rate for the same day, which is much less than most of banks, and no-one will give you the ECB rate, as that is the mid-rate.

You mean 2019? ???? BTC is now at 18,160 USD, so if you bought in December of 2020 then you would be in the red. My portfolio definitely down YTD, but I invest in productive assets, so I mainly care about how profitable the companies I invest in are (expected to be) relative to their price, and YTD I have received around $60,000 in dividends, because even though some of the companies are down 20% YTD, they are still profitable and paying dividends to the stockholders. That is the big difference between crypto (non-productive assets) and stocks (productive assets). And yes, commodities are also non-productive assets and many are up YTD, but those assets have end users, e.g. you don’t but oil, wheat, or soy beans to just hold it for all of eternity.

He just says there are some good technologies used, those are Merkle trees, cryptographic hash functions, public/private key infrastructure, the hashcash idea to guard against DoS attacks, etc., all this stuff predates the bitcoin white paper, and note how Bill himself says “talked about as blockchain”. Also, from an economic/game theory perspective the bitcoin idea is very interesting, but also flawed because of some unfortunate couplings, like how it must be more expensive to attack the network than the potential reward you get from attacking it, which is what leads to this huge cost of performing the transactions. For the smart blockchains (like Ethereum) you also have some unfortunate couplings, like how miners can front-run people. In bitcoin this doesn’t matter, but when you start to build decentralized exchanges on the blockchain, you start to see that miners (or bots) will scan pending transactions for potential arbitrage possibilities and simply “steal” this opportunity by (for miners) front-running the user, and for bots, post a transaction and offer the miner a higher fee. So nice try appealing to authority, but Bill does not say what you think he said. Also, still waiting for you to reply to my question about whether a “private blockchain” needs a consensus algorithm.

IOW you can’t give an actual example of how blockchain solves problems, but you think I need to do more research? Let me ask you something simple: Does a private blockchain require a consensus algorithm?

What does that mean? You really don’t see this as vague hand-wavy salesmanstalk? If I am going to sell you a product and I just tell you it will improve productivity, transparency, and efficiency, you will be satisfied? Or will you ask how does your product do that? Honestly @dj230 I am disappointed that you think the above is a meaningful response to my question. Try google some of the things mentioned, e.g. the only thing blockchain about TradeLens is that is uses IBM’s Blockchain stuff, which I already said is in name only, and CoinDesk agrees: “IBM develops private and permissioned blockchains, which stand in contrast to public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. IBM notably utilizes Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source blockchain protocol developed by the Linux Foundation-hosted Hyperledger consortium” — a private and permissioned blockchain is nonsensical, it is just a database, as there is no consensus algorithm and no network that untrusted nodes can join, and presumably no random person can download the full database/blockchain. It really is all just marketing speak to make people with little understanding of these things think that this is new and innovative.