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I don’t know about the 50 free GBP transactions per month, but you can get a free debit card associated with your account. This allows you to either withdraw via an ATM, although there is monthly limit, or, you can open an account with Revolut and top-up the Revolut account using your Wise debit card, this is free of charge, and from Revolut, you can transfer to another bank account, also free of charge. Not sure how Revolut can charge debit cards without paying a fee, but I have seen a few other institutions also provide free deposits via VISA/Mastercard.

For financial institutions that invest other people’s money? No, rather, the opposite, There are strict regulation to ensure transparency and proper disclosure. You started this thread ranting about “Tether Truthers”, I wonder, what would the opposite of these be called? Because I think I have found one ????

I should have added education (as an indirect input when creating value), and as for “worth more”, one measure (that does not require the PnL of the business) could be if a) the buyer needs the product/service, and b) are either unable to create it themselves, or would have to spend more of their “time” doing so, than the time required for them to earn enough money to pay for it. I put “time” in quotes, as if the product/service include materials then “time” would include time required to earn money to also buy these materials. The same applies to any training/education required to create the product/service provided. Not that I want to claim that this is the universal definition of all value creation, but I think it’s a pretty good approximation ????

I believe what you are remembering was Bitfinex, which used Crypto Capital Corp. for shadow banking, and with Crypto Capital Corp. being involved with money laundering and drug traffickers, they got their accounts frozen, which left Bitfinex without enough liquidity to satisfy customer withdrawal demand (they had $850M with CCC). There is an infamous leaked chat between Bitfinex and Crypto Capital Corp., where the Bitfinex guy is pleading to get some millions back. But Bitfinex and Tether was basically the same team, so they ended up paying out Tether reserves to Bitfinex customers. Here is the gist of the CFTC press release: “[…] the Tether order finds that […] Tether reserves were not “fully-backed” the majority of the time. The order further finds that Tether failed to disclose that it included unsecured receivables and non-fiat assets in its reserves, and that […] Tether reserves were not audited […] Tether […] comingled reserve funds with Bitfinex’s operational and customer funds; […] Tether and Bitfinex’s combined assets included funds held by third-parties, including at least 29 arrangements that were not documented through any agreement or contract, and that Tether transferred Tether reserve funds to Bitfinex, including when Bitfinex needed help responding to a “liquidity crisis.” Note that this is from back when USDT market cap was only a few billions, today it is almost $80B. And what about the commercial papers they are holding? Basically they won’t say anything about anything, and yet they proclaim to be industry leaders in transparency (yes, seriously!) There are limits to how much benefit of doubt you can give them, because they sure are acting exactly like someone with something to hide, and it would be so easy to remove some of this doubt without subjecting themselves to being shut down by the U.S., on the contrary, the largest fear among regulators and lawmakers right now is that Tether is unbacked and that is why they are starting to become a target, because they have surpassed Bernie Madoff and Enron in market cap / money being managed. The collapse of both lead to several suicides. If it turns out that Tether is unbacked, this will not end well… though even with Tether being backed, I don’t see this ending without a lot of personal tragedy. Many people have invested more than they can afford to lose.

I don’t think you can give an all-encompassing definition that wouldn’t be too broad or somewhat subjective. The general understanding though is that value is created when you take inputs, such as materials and labour, and create an output, such as a product or services, that is worth more than the sum of the inputs. And you can determine this, by simply looking at the business’ profit and loss statement. For bitcoin, people are just reselling, therefore we should instead compare it to an arbitrage business. For example, you can create value by buying bulk and transporting the product nearer the customer, and then sell at a profit. The value created for the customer in this case was transportation. You can also buy rice when the prices are low, and then sell them at a profit, when the price goes up, the value provided here was storage. But rather than trying to give an exhaustive definition of value creation, why don’t you tell us, what value bitcoin is creating? And please don’t give the infinite chain of people keep selling at a profit, that is basically the definition of a speculative bubble: People buy only with the intent to resell at a higher price. This only works with products for which there is a final consumer, e.g. with the rice example above, we are not reselling the rice hundreds of times, and making a profit on each sale, we are storing the rice until prices goes up (because of low supply), and then we are selling into the market of people who actually need to eat this rice, and not just resell it again. This ties together with your previous comment about how the price is determined by supply and demand: All demand is based on speculation about future demand, with no actual consumer in sight, so it’s nonsensical.

Please look into the people who run Binance, Bitfinex, Tether, Celsius Network, etc., many of them have questionable pasts, and there have already been lots of action (fines, cease and desist orders, warnings, etc.) from U.S. district courts etc. related to many of the operators in DeFi. If you read the report from CFTC about Tether you will see that they were not fully backed for some of the time periods that the CFTC looked into, that Tether and Bitfinex commingled customer funds, had non-documented lending arrangements with several third parties etc. Personally I like to see hard evidence before jumping to conclusions, and I don’t fully understand how, if USDT is unbacked, it can last for this long (although I think staking/yield farming is playing a crucial role), but you must admit, there is a hell of a lot of smoke surrounding Tether. And if they are actually backed, why are they refusing to submit to a proper audit? Contrary to what they promised in the past. They also refuse to reveal any of their partners, or even what commercial papers they are holding. This doesn’t make any sense, if they are actually running a legit business.

My former (European) bank terminated our relationship because new regulation made it too much of a hassle for them to deal with business customers, it was a smaller bank, so they decided that going forward, they would only serve customers with personal accounts. So it might also be something like that, i.e. only “the big ones” are willing to spend the necessary resources to comply with new regulation, which presumably involve “costly” screening of money above 50,000 baht entering the country. Edit: Although in this case, the money is sent from Wise, so one would think it falls upon Wise to do this AML/KYC screening. This is indeed a bit strange.

I sincerely doubt that they are bribing anyone. They have already been fined by the CFTC due to their past behavior, and they have lost all but one Bahamas-based banking connection, so effectively cut off from the established banking system. A lot of this stuff happens offshore, so who are even the regulators?

Stocks represent companies that generate value, i.e. for every $100 invested in the S&P 500 index, the underlying companies generated $3.41 of pure profit during the last 4 quarters. This is what you are buying: Ownership in this cashflow. You can argue stocks are overvalued, but I don’t see how you get to a pyramid scheme? If people buy a stock and expect it to sell it more expensive later, it should only be because they believe the company will have increased their earnings. E.g. Tesla expect to increase car sales with 50% yearly over the next many years, so while the stock IMHO is hugely overpriced, people buy it because they think that Tesla will sell 8-10M cars by the end of this decade, not because they think they can find a sucker who is willing to pay even more for the stock.

You misunderstood my analogy. You said that currently people are making money with crypto, so right now, it is not a zero-sum game, because the last buyer has not yet run into a liquidity problem. My point with the Brooklyn Bridge was that you lose your money the minute you buy, not when you cannot resell. Rather, you make up your loss, if you manage to resell. This is because you bought a non-productive asset with no final consumer (re: the supply/demand tangent). And my point has always been that no value is being created in the real economy. When you go to a casino, on average you lose something like 3% of what you spend, so that is the price for being entertained. Most people going to a casino know this. But nobody is buying bitcoin for the entertainment value, and expect to lose 3%. All the “investors” expect to get rich from this. But this is just not possible, at best, we just transfer money, but it is much worse, because the cost of running the network is in the millions of dollars per day, and a large part of the new money that enter the ecosystem is just used to pay for this.

What a surprise, when you can’t argue facts, attack the opponent, as is so often the case in these threads. And I never said everyone would lose money. Surely, some will make out like bandits, I just say overall, if we ignore the billions of dollars so far spent on electricity and hardware, it is a zero-sum game, so no money “in the real economy” has been created, therefore, if Richard Heart made a billion on his HEX coin, that billion was just transferred from other people, who effectively lost that billion. They might be able to pass on the loss, by selling to another sucker, but eventually, we should run out of greater fools. If value was actually being created, it should be easy to explain. And here, I am not referring to subjective value, like being entertained, I am referring to value, as in accounting.

For the people gambling on horses? Yes! The sum of money “invested” in gambling on horses is certainly more than the total amount of prize money paid out (assuming we do not have sponsors who make up the difference), same with lotteries, casinos, etc. Sure, there is value for some people in participating in these things, but that doesn’t mean monetary value is created out of thin air. Money is just moved from participants (gamblers) to those running the show (e.g. casino owners). As for the Brooklyn Bridge, you missed the reference. It is like paying for naming rights to stars: It is money out the window, and any certified accountant will put it down as a loss the minute you pay for it, not two years later, when you realize you’ve been had ???? But I am content with you realizing that “eventually” it will be zero-sum (because no new money was created during the speculative bubble) and that it is effectively gambling. And I will agree with you, gambling does provide value to some people, and yes, people can make a lot of money gambling. As for staking, feel free to enlighten me about any cashflow I may have missed. Those I have seen has either been redistribution through various means, or just suspected ponzi schemes, as the operators would not reveal how they are providing the returns (though I think this is normally called yield farming rather than staking).

I have since replied, though you actually said »I do not disagree that it is a "zero-sum game"«. I also think you have it a little backwards, the hard thing to explain is how you can create value by just manipulating numbers in a database. Without showing this, it should by default be considered a zero-sum game. But we have had this come up in pretty much every crypto thread on this forum, and no-one has been able to explain value creation in crypto. At best, people will just point to something else and say “what about that?”. If you do not understand or cannot explain how something creates value, I would argue that you shouldn’t invest in it. People have previously made parallels to the dotCom: This is actually very apt, because we had lots of companies where their business plan did not include anything about creating value, just get mass adoption, and all these businesses have since gone bankrupt.

But all these methods are just transferring value from one person to another, right? No value is being created. E.g. the staking schemes tend to just issue new coins, i.e. people’s ownership ratio of total coins is changed, but no value is being created. If you agree that it is a zero-sum game, then by definition, one person’s gain is another person’s loss. So I do not understand what it is you want me to explain. Btw: When I said “at best” it is because I ignore the price of running the network. This cost is not insignificant, and the participants in the game indirectly pay this cost, so when you factor in this, and exclude the miners and various “founders” (who assign themselve coins), then it is a negative-sum game. That is a strange way to think of it. When I bought the Brooklyn bridge, did I lose my money when a) I gave my money to George C. Parker, or b) when I found out, that I could not resell the bridge? I think most people would answer A. You didn’t say this, but what is often misunderstood about crypto is, that it is not like a bank or a game of poker, where all the money put into the pot is still there. For example, I think Coinbase stated that their customers have $25B worth of crypto stored on their exchange (I am quoting from memory, so I might misremember this number). That means their customers believe that they collectively hold $25B worth of value that they can convert to USD and withdraw, but that is not the case, Coinbase does not have any obligation to their customers about redeeming their coins for fiat, the only way to withdraw those $25B is to find other people who will buy these coins. Even with a ponzi scheme, like Bernie Madoff, there are just a few guys receiving all the money, and you can go after their assets to reclaim some of the money invested, but with crypto, due to the many fees and high cost of running the network, a lot of the money invested are already lost, and the rest are distributed among too many people to pursue (and there isn’t really any legal framework to actually pursue this, e.g. if you bought BTC at $64k you do not have any claim against anyone, because it has since dropped to $46k). Even if you buy shares in a company, and the share price drop, you might take legal action if the CEO or board has mislead investors.

For other assets (like oil, rice, coffee, soy beans, aluminum, etc.) we have producers and consumers. It makes sense that rice prices goes up, when rice harvest fails due to drought, or that energy prices goes down, because of production shutdowns due to a financial crisis, or similar. Crypto coins are made out of thin air (I believe we have >10,000 different coins), and no-one in the real economy are dependent on any of them (and if there were, they could just create their own). So how can you talk about supply and demand?

Gold does not have a cashflow, correct. So if you buy gold today, the only way to make a profit is, if you can find someone that is willing to pay more than what you bought it for, and your profit is funded 100% by that person. Main difference compared to bitcoin is that gold does have some uses, e.g. electronics and decoration/jewelry, so the chance of running out of buyers is small, unlike a purely speculative asset, for which the market of greater fools tend to eventually dry up, since mathematically, price can’t continue to go up each time the asset is resold, and once the price stops going up, the entire point of buying it will disappear. You can argue that one use of bitcoin is as a currency on dark web marketplaces, so as long as there are these market places, it will be possible to sell the coins. But this doesn’t change BTC away from being a non-productive asset, and since these marketplaces tend to exchange BTC back to USD (or other fiat), no real demand for BTC is created, unlike e.g. the demand for CHF, where Swiss exporters do not exchange CHF received back to USD, as all their costs and taxes are in CHF, thereby giving CHF value relative to the currency used by those trading with Switzerland.

It is a non-productive asset, no value is being created while you hold the coins. It is no different than buying a casino token or beanie baby, then later selling it. You might sell it for a profit, but only if someone else pays more then you did. Your profit is 100% funded by the next buyer. This is unlike a productive asset, e.g. buy a condo, rent it out, sell it for same price a year later. You still made a profit from rental income. That is not a zero-sum game, because the asset has a cashflow, and your profit came from this cashflow, not from selling the condo at a higher price.

Probably something was lost in translation. I’ve helped people open accounts which were also initially told “no”. The trick is not to ask to speak with the manager, but to understand what the real reason is. This pandemic thing makes no sense, and you say it took a long time to explain, so my guess is that more was said to your wife, and possibly your wife did not feel confident enough to challenge the initial rejection / find out what the real problem was, and how it could be addressed.

As for risk, OP’s entire premise is flawed: Having a bank in charge of selling casino chips does not improve the odds when placing it all on black. As for crypto, at best, it is a zero sum game, everything won in crypto, someone else lost. None of these crypto-proponents have been able to dispute that by explaining how value is being created. And this is why crypto-proponents spam the non-crypto forum with this <deleted>: They need a steady stream of new money to have enough liquidity for them to cash out.

Can anyone recommend a bank with good bank statements that can be exported as CSV or Excel? To elaborate, I have a Krungthai personal and business account, for the latter, I can export as Excel, but for the former, they only support PDF and HTML (which they mislabel as Excel). I have previously been banking with SCB, I didn’t check if statements could be exported, but their statement text was completely useless, basically just a date, a serial number, and the amount. No vendor information or anything like that. Krungthai is “acceptable” but I still have statement text like “21071-A0120210420014743675” (that was an online payment to AirAsia), and the “Short Note” I can enter when I transfer money to other people is not used for my own statement, nor does money transferred to my account show any note from the sender. So curious if any of you can recommend a bank that does “nice” statements which can easily be exported as CSV or Excel?