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How did you calculate that amount? When you receive more than ~$10,000 worth of money, most banks will give a better exchange rate than what is shown on their website.

You need to go out more! There must be thousands if not tens of thousands of gold shops in Thailand because they literally do go for the gold, that, and photos of wads of cash on Facebook every single day (if you follow anyone from rural Thailand). I have never seen people more obsessed with gold and riches, although again, this is predominantly the poor and uneducated Thais.

Cost of keeping an empty property in Thailand is close to zero, so if they do not need the money, they’d rather just “wait it out”. OP seems to value the property at 460K but seller wants 650K. That is a difference of 190K, so even if it takes ten years before someone comes along willing to pay 650K, it may still be deemed worth the wait. As for rental price, the thinking can be that if I let someone have it for 500 baht less/month, I will get 500 baht less for all of eternity, so better wait until someone is willing to pay the asking price. Alternatively the rental price may have been set based on “is it worth it for me” — for example someone wanted to rent my unit, and I quoted a price that would make it worth it for me, that was probably above the market rate, but anything less, and I’d rather just have the room empty and not worry about wear and tear, being a landlord, chance of non-payment or late payment, etc.

I am selling my unit and have some things that I am not taking with me. I was wondering if there is a Facebook group or similar where I can announce stuff that I am giving away? I know that if I ask the cleaning lady or guard, they will gladly take everything, but this is my plan B, as I don’t really want to give them ethernet cables, laser printer, and such items, which I am sure they have no use for.

Right, let us keep majority of the population uneducated so that we can continue to pay 350 baht/day for their labour, because they are happy doing it their way…

Can’t really compare this to interests as staking rewards are generally done by issuing new coins, so you are diluting the supply. For example, if everybody with SOL was staking their coins, and they got 4% for this, there would have to be added 4% new coins to cover this expense, so effectively you just debase each coin with 4% and give each coin owner 4% more in new coins, i.e. it’s all a wash. The only way this can work in practice is when the coins have no underlying value, because if you actually had some underlying value (e.g. a stable coin backed by USD) it would be trivial to show that you are paying staking rewards by issuing new unbacked coins.

I am not OP haggling over 500 baht. Also, while it may have seemed like my post was just bashing Thai people, that wasn’t my point: The problem is that too many Thai people don’t have access to a proper education, not Thai culture or anything like that. Just poor people w/o proper education, you find that in many countries. When you can’t do a budget of condo expenses, calculate sq. meter asking price and put multiple similar units into a spreadsheet, calculate opportunity cost if money was invested elsewhere, etc. then you can’t be expected to set a rational price.

I think it also has to do with lousy education. Many Thais cannot do basic math, they can’t do percentage calculations, they don’t know how much a meter is, they can’t read maps, they can’t research basic things themselves, and they will rely heavily on what elders tell them, even elders who are even less educated than themselves. Not saying every Thai is like that, but from what I pick up (as someone who understands Thai), it’s probably a majority. And without these skills, things become abstract to them, and their choices irrational. I have seen countless examples of this, but often the irrational behavior came from limited understanding. I recently tried to help a Thai girl with her life situation, as she always had to borrow money, so first step was to get a budget done. This actually took five months! She would list her expenses, but they were wrong, the interests she thought she paid on her debt was wrong, the amount she had to pay was wrong, and there were many things she forgot. So only by going month-by-month for five months, did I actually have the full picture of her finances. During the period, I did suggest various alternative ways to earn money, but she just couldn’t follow the business plan and thought it would not make her enough money, even though her current situation is factory worker with ~10,000 baht/month with no prospect of a raise, and expenses for at least 15,000 baht/month.

And how did that turn out? Lots of people lost their money, because there was no underlying value, so yes, that aspect of the stock market is indeed similar to crypto (“Irrational exuberance”). But most companies are valued based on earnings and growth potential.

With a treasure asset though, somebody is owing you money, and they will pay you interests on that money. If you buy BTC, nobody will pay you interest, and nobody owes you anything. So a better analogy would be a commodity. You can place your money in a commodity (corn, oil, wheat, copper, etc.) and you have the commodity until you sell it to someone else. Main difference though is that you can pretty much always sell corn, copper, or oil, because there are people or industries that depend on these things. Not sure who depend on BTC.

With stocks, it is not that when a stock becomes expensive, it takes more money to move the price further. The price is based on the underlying performance of the company, so while you may find that e.g. Apple has grown so big, that they are selling a new iPhone every single year to every person on the planet, and therefore they can no longer grow their profit and therefore their stock stops growing, as a share in Apple is really just partial ownership of the profit generated by Apple, so if that has sthbilized, so should their share price. But there are many examples of large companies growing even larger. Apple was the first company to hit a $1 trillion dollar market cap in 2018, and only two years later, they hit $2 trillion. Today we have several companies worth more than a trillion dollars, and lock at NVIDIA’s meteoric rise, but this is all about companies selling goods and services with a profit and growing their market. You simply cannot compare this dynamic to price of crypto coins, as there is no underlying activity that we can use to value things. So again, why do you think more people buying BTC will cause less volatility? With the stock market, it is sort of the opposite, all the retail traders cause more volatility because they generally lack the skills to properly value stocks, so they buy and sell based on emotions. With BTC you only have these traders who buy and sell based on emotions, as all models to price BTC is based on either technical analysis (emotions) or stock-to-flow, but that is not much different from TA.

More money = more people interested in buying? That means increased demand, but supply cannot be increased to follow demand. Economics 101 says that when demand is larger than supply the price will go up. So how do you conclude that more money going into bitcoin will lead to a less volatile price? Also, the way you say “more money comes into BTC” makes me wonder if you have tought through how bitcoin sales actually work: If I buy a coin for $65k then I will pay someone else for this coin, this someone may take the $65k and spend it on a new car or similar, so the money is no longer there. There is not a big pool of money that can be used, when people wants to cash out of bitcoin. If you want to cash out, a requirement is that someone else is willing to buy your coin from you, there is no market maker that will step in or some pool of cash you can take from, and leave your bitcoin somewhere else. And this is why the price is so volatile, it’s like baseball trading cards.

There are a bunch of technical problems that just makes it a really bad payment method, but ignoring that, there is also a fundamental problem with how coins are issued, as fiat is really an IOU but a crypto coin is more like a virtual commodity, and the worth of it is therefore determined by how much the next guy is willing to pay for it (in goods, services, or fiat). It is true that USD (and other currencies) are no longer backed by gold, but central banks still operate using a balance sheet, and all issued currency are liabilities for the central bank which will have assets that match these liabilities, this used to be gold, but today it will be mortgage-backed securities, government bonds, a.s.o. So USD and other currencies are not unbacked per se, but crypto is. Sure, we may have too much debt, and in theory the US government could default on their debt, which would render government bonds worthless (or at least lose some value), and that would affect currencies partially backed by US government bonds. But this is all very well understood (by people who study these things) and crypto is not a solution to this problem, regulation and oversight normally is. Crypto often seems to advocate the opposite, but the proof is in the pudding, and so far the history of crypto is filled with examples of a lot of perceived wealth being wiped out in an instant, like FTX, Quadriga, MtGox, Terra/Lunar, Celsius Network, Three Arrows Capital, a.s.o. — and we also have 100 billion worth of USDT where the issuers refuse to submit to an audit, so going by Occam’s razor, those 100 billlion does not exist.

They are incorrect for me as well. The problem is that the transactions are not sorted properly (they are reverse chronological by month, but chronological by time of day, and some months also by day of month). So there is no way they could have a meaningful balance column without re-ordering the transactions to be consistently chronological or reverse chronological.

Transferring a bitcoin relies on the bitcoin network, i.e. it is not true “peer to peer” (or permissionless) as you cannot send me a bitcoin without relying on third party miners. So it is this network (of third party miners) that provide value, not the bitcoin itself, do you agree? I.e., if the network shuts down, bitcoins lose their value, as we have seen with many alt coins. But to use this network (of third party miners), which indeed does provide value, we actually pay a transaction fee to these miners, furthermore, the miner who handles our transaction is additionally given a block reward: New bitcoins issued and given to the miner, thus an indirect cost to everyone holding bitcoins. I think it is important to understand this distinction, as then we can put a value on things, the bitcoin network is effectively competing with Wise, PayPal, Western Union, MoneyGram, a.s.o., which provide a similar service, although with their services, you interact with a known third party, whereas with bitcoin, you interact with an unknown third party. But the existence of the bitcoin mining network should not affect the value of a bitcoin, i.e. it does not provide the “intrinsic value” as you mention above. For me, it is not about price, I would need to be shown how value is actually being generated, i.e. how this is not just (at best) a zero-sum game. And not subjective value like “I think it has value that I can send money to someone in Africa without needing my bank’s approval”, as I showed above, such thing can certainly have value, but we need to examine exactly where the value is coming from, i.e. in the above statement the value is from the network not the coin itself, and we have a pretty good idea of what the value of sending money abroad is (i.e. the price currently charged by Western Union etc., or even the BTC transaction fee). Furthermore I would like to add that it seems that criminal gangs, scammers, sanctioned regimes, and other actors who cannot use the traditional banking system have seized on stable coins, and there is a strong correlation between the price of bitcoin and the amount of USDT issued. Therefore it seems very likely that USDT is partially (and possibly indirectly) backed by BTC, and the amount if outstanding USDT is proportional to how much circulating stable coins the above actors need, which (unfortunately) seems to be a rising amount. I mention this because this is might actually be some of the real demand for BTC, i.e. anyone buying BTC as an investment is just doing so as pure speculation, but someone needing a $1B USDT loan actually need BTC to provide as security, and right now, there seem to be these people taking out loans like that, who have few other options because of their activities.

A currency (like USD, EUR, etc.) is a medium of exchange, not an investment vehicle to “gain wealth”. As for scarcity and traditional assets, lots of assets have scarcity, prime real estate would be a good example. Also, traditional assets generally have intrinsic value, e.g. if I own all the copper in the world, I could set my own price, because people need copper for certain things (although set it too high, and people will find substitute materials), but if I own all the bitcoins in the world, who would actually have a need for them? What we “no coiners” fail to understand is how this is not just a giant zero-sum game. A rather succesful one, I must admit, but still just a zero-sum game with nothing of value having been produced.

The buildings I am familiar with, where title deed just include increased ceiling height rather than two separate floors do pay common fee based on the registered area on the title deed. And yes, it seems a bit unfair, just two different laws written without knowledge of the other.

I believe that a previous version of the Thai Condo Act defined the ratio of payment of common expenses as the ratio of the (initial) sales price of the unit. Many developers will price their units relative to how high they are up (premium for the nicer view), so this could explain OP’s friend. The current Thai Condo Act just says that building expenses must be shared according to each co-owners ownership ratio of the common area, i.e. based on their registered size on the title deed. I have had a lawyer tell me that the building can decide to charge different rates for different units, but I just don’t see how that is compatible with the Thai Condo Act.

And? I don’t get your point at all. Banks often add 1-2% to the VISA/MasterCard exchange rate when used abroad, and for cards issued within the EU, they are not limited by EU’s cap on interchange fees when used outside the EU. So regardless of credit or debit card, banks often make an extra cut of the spending when used abroad, and it makes no sense to me why a bank would want to freeze a card for other reasons than suspected fraud.

That’s just crazy — I have heard of cards being frozen because the bank thought it was fraud, but they shouldn’t deny their customers to use the card abroad, on the contrary, many banks will make extra fees from this. As for Revolut and Wise, they are basically designed to be used away from home.

OK, think the log in is the issue, there is a profile icon “top left”, but it is partly in the status bar and does not register my clicks. Apple changed the screen metrics some years ago, and apps that hasn’t been updated tend to have things end up in non-clickable areas of the status bar 😞 Amazing that the app has a 4.0 rating on the iOS app store, because it is practically useless, with many buttons not working, I even got into a screen where I had to force quit because the “back” button was inaccessible. This, and half the screens are just taking you to a web page, not even remembering my cookie consent choice from last time, or suppressing the “install the app” banner at the top.

Are you talking about this app (iOS)? I can click “More” and then ROP, but that just opens a web browser. The app seems extremely limited, most things just open web pages that each have cookie consent forms and a banner at the top about downloading the Thai Airways app, and it seems the app has not been updated for the dynamic island, so controls (like back) is often un-clickable. Couldn’t find a way to really “log in” in the app, nor show my member card or anything like that.

Someone else is migrating to Thailand and I offered to help carry their stuff.

Crappy rate and foreign exchange fee is not really solved by opening a bank account. I believe most people use Wise for exchanging money to get the best rate, they have a debit card which you can use in Thailand. So it really boils down to the ATM fee. I’m surprised though that no-one has brought up PromptPay, I think that is actually a better reason; if you want t go cashless in Thailand, you need a bank account that support QR payments, as VISA/MasterCard is normally not accepted by smaller/street vendors.

I hate fees as much as the next guy, but on a vacation budget, 220 baht a few times is really not that much, and it is not like Thailand is an outlier, pretty much all countries put in place hurdles for foreigners to open a bank account. They do this not only because there are actually expenses for the bank to open an account, but also because of AML/KYC. Having tourists walk in from the street with nothing but a passport and allow them to open a bank account is definitely going to be abused. Many of the operations scamming U.S. and Canadian citizens (romance scams, fake tech support, etc.) actually use Thai bank accounts (in addition to gift cards, bitcoins, and local money mules). I imagine it’s a headache for the bank each time such an account gets flagged, and that is probably why they want you to show a work permit, one year lease, or similar, as just a very basic KYC check.