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It was “their best” not “the best” ???? but I just took the rate and date from the last 6 USD credit remittances (above $10k) and entered into a spreadsheet and looked up Google’s rate for the same date: On average KTB’s rate was 0.26% worse than Google’s. The best I got was 0.11% and worst was 0.50%. Adding to this though is a flat fee of 550 baht charged by the bank. For comparison, Wise is generally 0.4%-0.6% worse than the Google rate, so for larger amounts, KTB is normally better than Wise.

In 2015 my bank (KTB) told me that anything above $50,000 would need me to come to the bank and fill out some form. I can see that I have done two transfers above $50,000 (since 2015), but I am quite sure that I only did the form for one of them. Anyway, 300,000 THB should not be something to worry about. But as others have pointed out, your bank may delay exchanging foreign currency to THB because they need you to confirm. I managed to get my bank to make a note in their journal or something, which says that they should just give me the best rate they can, no need for awaiting my confirmation. Also, this “better rate” (that needed confirmation) was for amounts above $10,000. Lower amounts just get the rate shown on their site. And when I get money from abroad, I first get an email telling me the money has been received, and a preliminary rate, but the money is not deposited into my account until a few hours later. Perhaps that is the alternative to me confirming, i.e. just email me the rate, and give me 2-6 hours to object.

This sounds a little crazy and highly risky for Xe (what if the rate changes in the customer’s favor). Looking at their page though, I can’t find any details about this, and they write “fast and easy”, which a week wouldn’t be. Where did you get the above information from? Edit: I guess they could exchange money and *then* invest it, but no investment is guaranteed a return, so still sounds risky.

I would go ask your bank what they need. It sounds like you technically didn’t import foreign currency into the country (as it was not sent to an account in your name) and you probably have no title deed. The bank will know, what kind of documentation they need to assist you in sending these money abroad. But I fear that you will have a hard time fulfilling their requirements, in which case, I guess you need to go look into the alternative money transmitters like DeeMoney.

Correct me if I am wrong, but Bitkub charges you 0.25% in commission to buy the bitcoins, and the BTC price when you are paying with THB tend to be at least a few percentage points higher (because more people wants to sell THB than buy THB), commission on Coinbase (converting crypto to fiat) is 0.5-2%, and there is additional cost to withdraw. So you’re probably looking at losing 3-6% of the total amount by going via Bitcoin.

This will be a problem because Interactive Brokers do not assign you an account number, but instead rely on the “message” of the transfer to include your account ID number and your name, which is normally outside your control when you go through a third party. Some of these “neo banks” offer you to buy stocks directly, e.g. Revolut gives you one commission free trade per month (you can do more, of course, just not for free), and you can add money to your Revolut account via a regular debit/credit card (without fees), though you can also transfer via regular bank transfer, and they support multiple currencies, even allow you to buy/sell currency at market price.

I’ll match your bus: And then I raise you a row of taxis:

I am not sure what you mean by that. That my question was basically rhetorical, because nobody would have realized profit exceeding their total cost? Remember though that bitcoin has split a few times, there have been airdrops, and some tokens could have been obtained by mining. So it could have been possible to have realized more profit than total cost. I asked you because you said you were “set up for life now”, hence perhaps you had been converting some of these airdrops or extra tokens from chain splits to real estate or other securities. But it sounds like you mainly have unrealized gains, am I correct? I realize you might not want to share too much detail about your finances, so it’s OK if you give my question a pass. I find it interesting though, that if my assumptions are correct, that you would still be buying. If you are really set up for life, you should think about preserving your wealth rather than grow it. I have a friend in exactly the same situation, triple digit number of bitcoins, yet he still has a mortgage and zero diversification.

By that logic, shares in Facebook is a good store of value.

For store of value you want low volatility. Bitcoin just dropped 10%. This is *not* a good store of value.

My secondary point was that it is only expensive to attack these existing chains because the true cost of a transaction is pretty high, with ETH it is not unusual to see fees of $50-100, for bitcoin the fee is only around $3, but that is because the miners are subsidized to the tune of more than $200 per transaction in hidden fees (the 6.25 bitcoins issued per block grows the entire pool of coins and should in theory cause inflation for all holders of BTC). It will be interesting to see what happens to network size and/or transaction fees once the mining reward is halved again, or goes away, because miners only mine as long as it is profitable for them, and if network size goes down, so goes your security. But the real question is: Why would financial institutions use this technology? I.e. why is it better than what they currently have? Visa and Mastercard do thousands of instant transactions for a fraction of the cost and their reach is pretty much global, they don’t need blockchain to accomplish this, on the contrary, not only would blockchain be slower (wait for block confirmation), more expensive (see true cost of transaction), it would also be a privacy nightmare, if everyone could follow my transaction history, and of course, it doesn’t scale to the number of transactions that real institutions actually do.

Blockchain is not impossible to forge. Numerous 51% attacks have taken place in recent years and there have been many humorous rants on twitter from people who have seen their image (that they paid for as an NFT) “stolen”, as big surprise, paying to get a signature stored in a blockchain is not a solution for piracy. Regarding the attacks om the blockchain, the problem is that it should basically be more expensive to create the blockchain than the value being secured. If you do money laundering or other illegal activity, you might be willing to pay this high price, but for regular finance, it is useless.

I believe the phrase “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” is appropriate here ???? See how HEX has twice been mentioned in this thread as a good investment. Richard Heart is a really smart guy, and HEX is a brilliant scam. Anyone with half a brain will believe whatever he is selling. Same goes for majority of the coins out there. Even you seem to think you have found coins with *actual* real world value. I have yet to come across one, so maybe you would like to share?

Precious time? As a global citizen concerned about global warming, financial stability, tax evasion, and a general interest in crime and scams, crypto comes up a lot. Negative, sure. But false? Is it false that IMF put in a whole chapter about crypto in their latest report about things to be concerned about? That Sweden is asking EU to ban proof of work mining because it will hinder our goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃, etc. This again, yes, if the facts are against you, attack the messenger… ????

I first bought AMZN in May of 2008, and I don’t remember it ever dropping 90%. Worst I think, was around 30%. But how is this related to crypto? Amazon was initially a bookstore that got their revenue from selling books online, then they expanded into more of a market place, taking a cut of other people’s sales, and also introduced their Amazon Web Services, which provides infrastructure for a large number of businesses, who all pay Amazon for this infrastructure, and today they have media subscription services, hardware, etc. People who bought Amazon shares bought a piece of this business, and their share price has gone up, because the business keeps growing, bringing in more revenue and higher earnings. Can you explain to me what you get, if you buy BTC or ETH?

I think the point was that a registered FA would not do this, in fear of being fined. You can have a look at press releases from the SEC, I grabbed the headlines of about a dozen related to crypto which are below. Granted, some of this is about fraud or unregistered securities, but notice they also go after promoters of fraud, even if the promoter didn’t know it was fraud, and even if what they promoted wasn’t a fraud “per se”, and none of these people charged are even registered FAs. So I don’t think a registered FA would touch this with a ten-foot pole. I have seen one U.S. bank (I think it was JPMorgan) say they allow wealthy (or maybe it was ultra-wealthy) clients to invest in crypto (via ETF), but only if the client ask for it themselves, i.e. they are not allowed to suggest this to the client. Two Celebrities Charged With Unlawfully Touting Coin Offerings Actor Steven Seagal Charged With Unlawfully Touting Digital Asset Offering SEC Charges U.S. Promoters of $2 Billion Global Crypto Lending Securities Offering SEC Charges Film Producer, Rapper, and Others for Participation in Two Fraudulent ICOs SEC Charges Three Individuals in Digital Asset Frauds SEC Charges Robinhood Financial With Misleading Customers About Revenue Sources and Failing to Satisfy Duty of Best Execution SEC Charges Bitcoin Entrepreneur With Offering Unregistered Securities Telegram to Return $1.2 Billion to Investors and Pay $18.5 Million Penalty to Settle SEC Charges SEC Charges Poloniex for Operating Unregistered Digital Asset Exchange SEC Orders Blockchain Company to Pay $24 Million Penalty for Unregistered ICO SEC Charges Global Crypto Lending Platform and Top Executives in $2 Billion Fraud

And some prefer cash, but that shouldn’t stop banks from exploring new and easier payment methods ????

Others have already replied to this, but there are countless examples of people promoting crypto on their channel or twitter/instagram feed only because they got paid, or gets paid if the coin reaches a certain value. There have even been a few fines issued related to this. And just now, I saw the below “Media Kit” on reddit. Probably the safest way to make money in crypto is to make your own pre-mined coin, then pay some of these “influencers” to promote it, and be sure to sell once the sheep starts buying ???? Also, please listen to this podcast episode. It’s an interview with a guy who has been trading altcoins for quite some time, and he describes how he initially lost money doing so, but then he started to get into to the right telegram groups, so he would know which coins were about to be pumped. But bottom line is, none of this stuff has any value, it’s all just a greater fool game. I know this is hard to believe, with “market cap” of $2.5T or where ever we are at, and still going up, but look into Tether or the 125x leverage offered by Binance: The value is not there, and people will find out the hard way, when crypto experience their first major sell off, like we saw with subprime (2008), dotCom (2000), Japanese real estate (1992), etc.

You are posting in the “Jobs, economy, banking, business, investments” forum. Stop posting here if you don’t want to see informed investors comment and instead use the “Cryptocurrency News” section which was made for people like you, and where you will not find me commenting on anything!

I see you reacted with “sad” to my post giving a short description of the iShares MSCI ACWI ETF to someone who is unfamiliar with investing, so yeah, I can see why you think I am trolling, as trolls reveal themselves in these threads by talking about things like productive assets and cash flows…

My question was about cost, realized, and unrealized profit, because still buying, when you started in 2013, does sound like a lot of unrealized profit, but based on @ed strong’s response, he might refer more to “trading” (different coins).

You have been buying since 2013 and are still buying. So I take it that you have invested more than your realized profit?

You have previously said you do not like this guy, so why are you posting videos from him? Do you think he is an authority on inflation and are not tainted by the fact that he is long BTC for several billions?

Foreign accounts? That sounds even more strange, because I don’t think I can even do an international transfer without going to my bank with tons of documentation. There used to be an international transfer in my netbank, but last I checked, it was gone.

And cameo sellout who will endorse your crypto-coin for money.