lkn

If you live in a totalitarian regime that wants this, they will get it, assuming they are advanced enough, regardless of what the citizens do. If you don’t live in such regime, there will probably be none of it. Many European countries are already fully digital and has been for many years, and they have not developed in the same way as e.g. China. As for Thailand, I sincerely doubt the people in power have the skills to use any new data that would theoretically be available, when/if all payments are digital. I do also wonder, if there was actually any data collection going on regarding payments, wouldn’t the first victims be all the government/police employees taking bribes? That should actually be a good thing, if someone looked into all those additional payments going to government employees.

A preference for a desktop computer does not necessarily mean not being tech-savvy. I can export CSV statements from KTB Next and import into my double-entry accounting system, not possible via the app. I can copy/paste account numbers and amounts from PDF invoices or web sites, to handle these faster/easier and less chance of entering wrong digits, doing the same on a phone is at best extremely tedious, I can also much easier multitask between apps on a desktop.

Fairly easy, yes. Just go to your branch (with bank book and passport) and tell them that you want to register for online banking / K Biz. After a few days, you will receive an email with instructions about how to complete the process, which involves validating your email address and receiving an OTP on your phone, and after this, you can log in with a web browser using your username and password.

I’m surprised at how many drive around in cars without a driver’s license, and then of course there are those who just pay the standard fee to get the license without having to do any of the studying and testing. If they would start by making sure people actually know the law, and had to pass a driving test before they were allowed to drive, we would probably get a long way. Although I also agree, they definitely also need to enforce the laws.

I regularly import my bank statements into my accounting system. For this, I rely on proper descriptions in these statements. KTB is acceptable, but with KTB Next closing 1st of February, I will lose the ability to export a statement (the app only allows to send PDF statements by email, which is not ideal). I opened an account with Kasikorn, but their statements are terrible. It just says “Debit Card Spending” or “Transfer Withdrawal”, which can be anything. KTB would use the name of the business, or the account number that money was transferred to. I have previously tried SCB, but that was even worse, just showing long alphanumeric strings as the description. Before I go and open more Thai bank accounts, I wanted to ask if anyone can point to a bank where it is possible to easily export statements as CSV and where the descriptions used for the line items mention the third party that money was sent to or received from?

I would not draw any conclusions from the actions of KTB. KTB Next seems to have been written more than a decade ago, so the team who created it, is probably no longer there (or do not want to touch it), and it shares nothing with the rest of their web infrastructure, e.g. they have 2 (two!) additional web apps for corporate clients, which looks and acts nothing like KTB Next. Kasikorn OTOH seems to be using The Web Company for all their web infrastructure, their web app appears to be “modern”, and intended for both retail and corporate customers, the latter absolutely need a proper app (not just a phone app), so I don’t see them discontinuing this anytime soon.

I had a corporate account with KTB for which I wanted a debit card that I could give to staff, so they would have access to petty cash, without needing to write cheques or withdraw cash. But this was also not possible. The bank teller actually suggested that I open a personal account with debit card (in my name) and then give the debit card to the staff, then I could funnel petty cash through this extra (personal) account. I’ve since heard that all banks in Thailand have this policy (about not allowing ATM cards for corporate accounts), presumably to avoid fraud, as there is no paper record for ATM spending or requirement of two signatures.

I guess first we need to figure out what actually happened. If this was a remote exploit with no interaction from the victim, one would think that more people would have been affected. There recently was a thread on this forum about how Revolut would not compensate (all) victims of fraud, and reading the article, it was people who had actively transferred money to a third party, even ignoring in-app warnings about it, but as one of the victims said, the person on the phone told them to ignore these warnings… The lawyer in this story claims the victims did nothing, but then it goes on to report that one of them received an SMS from a Thai shopping app, which seems to indicate that perhaps the victim did actually do something to facilitate this scam…

This is not my experience: When I do online banking from my desktop (web browser), I need to confirm transfers with an OTP sent to my phone (so two devices). But when I do transfers on my phone, I have to first verify with biometrics (Face ID) to open the part of the app where I can set up transfers, but I also have to enter a PIN to confirm the transaction (final step), no OTP. So this is two factor (biometrics + PIN) and does not involve OTP. This is both with KTB Next (Krungthai) and K+ (Kasikorn). I have not used other Thai banking apps. Though for “Scan&Go” there is no initial biometrics confirmation, and at least for KTB Next, the confirmation PIN can be disabled for amounts below a configurable threshold (though by default, this PIN is required).

I am a big fan of Revolut. If you use it on weekdays and less than ~$1,000 per month, you get the “true” exchange rate (although recently I think this is not entirely true, but still better than what Wise offers me, when I have compared). The alternative is, as what another poster already said, get the Wise debit card. Here you get the mid-market rate plus a small fee (less than 1%), and unlike Revolut, there is no fair use limit or weekend fee. Though both Revolut and Wise have fair use limits on cash withdrawal in an ATM, so be sure to check these. Also, some ATMs have their own fees, especially “independently” operated ATMs in tourist areas. I generally seek out bank ATMs, as these tend to not have withdrawal fees.

It is easy to create a system where it is required that you first grant a third party access to your data, we already have plenty of such systems, and where you can also revoke this access. Problem is that the third party can copy all your data, before access is revoked, there is no solution to that problem, not even blockchain can solve this. And a traditional blockchain design is not about granting read-access to a third party, there is nothing in the original tokenomics ideas that is helpful to what you describe. Privacy is a big problem with blockchains, but yes, there are attempts of providing more “anonymous” blockchain designs, but… we’re really back to, stating a problem that can easily be solved by a traditional system, and then trying to retrofit a blockchain to solve that problem, because it must have zero-trust, but a) why do we need zero-trust for a database shared between hospitals?, b) what are the downsides when basing it on a blockchain? Because normally a blockchain design has many disadvantageous, c) this is not revolutionary or disrupting anything, and of course d) what is actually zero-trust? because even with a blockchain, we pretty much always end up with some parties we do have to trust. Apple is doing lots of stuff with end-to-end encryption, i.e. where nobody but the sender and receiver can read messages, not even Apple, they recently even enabled encryption of iCloud backsups, because they do not want to be in a situation where they can read your data, but all the devices you have granted access to, can read the data — none of this uses blockchain. Another example is some European countries have introduced digital citizen IDs which can be used to sign documents, communicate using encryption, and also grant access to some of their data to third parties (e.g. medical records, banking information, retirement savings, etc.), and again, none of this uses blockchain.

Re-reading the Thai Condo Act, I can’t actually find any requirement of approving a budget at all. It only talks about annual performance report and balance sheet. But since it is the committee that is responsible for organizing the General Meeting, I sort of think they should be responsible for the proposed budget as well, after all, they are there to oversee management, and also, budget will include salaries, bonus payments, etc., which is something the co-owners (or their elected representatives, i.e. committee) should decide, not “management” (JPM). But as said, it seems the Thai Condo Act actually has no mention of budgetting at all, which IMHO is quite an oversight.

How do you verify the withness? Or some notarization service in a foreign country? No, we need to receive the proxy from the co-owner. You can’t just show up to our meeting with a proxy from Mr. Anderson in Room 1350. We need the owner of Room 1350 to send us the proxy with your details.

The Land Office does check basic compliance. They do not enforce the Thai Condo Act (that is not their job), but they do check the documents submitted regarding General Meetings, the registered committee members, JPM, etc., and as part of this, one of the thing is also the invitation sent out and attendance, so if there are specific requirements for proxies, then I would think they would check it. But actually, there are no requirements put forth in the Thai Condo Act regarding proxies, i.e. it does not state anything about needing notarization or number of witnesses. I have once been told that for this, one should look at the Thai Business Act, but I was unsuccessful in finding the relevant law. And comparing this to not doing an audit: When we accept a proxy from a co-owner by email, there is no question that it is within the co-owner’s right to appoint a proxy, the only thing we don’t do is extra verification of the co-owner’s identity and that their signature has not been falsified. But if we are actually communicating with an imposter, that person is breaking the law, and it will be visible to everyone (via the meeting minutes), who was representing a non-present co-owner, and we do ask for copy of ID for the proxy, and the person need to be physically present at the meeting…

And how does that differ from a regular database system predating blockchain? Remember, the claim was that the blockchain could improve storing of medical records, specially, it would no longer store them “in one particular hospital's database” but rather on the blockchain. To which I replied that this is ridiculous, because we do not want medical records on a public blockchain, but then you say, it will be a private blockchain, so how is this different from how medical records are already stored? Presumably the idea is just that hospitals share the database, but they already do that in many European countries, and have done so even before “blockchain” was invented.

I see no legal issue with videotaping. During COVID-19, the Land Office explicitly allowed General Meetings to be held online. Personally though, I would not like to be videotaped, and if your desire is to videotape, I think it should be the first item on the agenda (to have the participants agree to this). As for notarization of proxies: We’ve had a pretty lax standard for proxies (to make it easier for people abroad to participate via proxy), and it has not caused an issues with the Land Office. I must say though, I do see people “take advantage of this”, i.e. co-owners who just try to collect proxies to get more voting power, i.e. co-owners that activately seek out proxies, rather than the opposite (someone prevented from participating, but wish to vote, seeking out a proxy). So maybe our policy is not ideal, given some of the petty people living in our building.

A private blockchain is an oxymoron. The idea with blockchain is that anyone can participate on equal terms to validate the correctness of the information on the chain, there is a reward system to incentivize people to “do the right thing”, and no central control. Once you make it private, introduce authorities, permissions, notary services, etc. then it is no longer a blockchain in any meaningful way, just a regular database and/or distributed system, which is something we have used for decades, and using them, e.g. for medical records, is not “blockchain disrupting traditional systems”. I already replied to that in this comment. Short answer is treasury bills and mortgage-backed securities, if we are talking about USD.

Because he is not considered a tourist due to his long stay in Thailand. It is quite common for “travel insurance” to have a definition of what is considered “travel”, which often limits it to 30-90 days. When I asked my insurance company about insurance while I was in Thailand, the duration of my stay was their first question.

Serious question, what exactly does an agent do with respect to opening a bank account? Is it just a finder’s fee for directing the client to a foreigner friendly bank?

If they asked for your Wise account then likely they themselves have a Wise account where they have Thai baht, and they can transfer THB from their account to yours, i.e. you can receive THB from other Wise users, but not via the regular banking system. Be aware that if you want to transfer this THB to a real Thai bank you will pay 31.70 THB. Alternatively you can get the Wise debit card and spend it via this card, but I think there is a fee to get this card. Though if you have a Thai bank account, I and the sender needs to send you THB, have them send to your Thai bank account.

I know you wrote, that you couldn’t say a lot, but can you clarify what the “obvious next step forward” refers to? Is it tokenization of arbitrary securities? Because I don’t assume it is the ability for everyone and their mother to participate on equal terms in validating financial transactions and earn reward tokens (the essence of a blockchain), nor that all banks in Thailand are interested in sharing the same ledger (DLT). And if it is neither of the above, it appears you are just creating BAHTNET V2.0, but threw in some buzzwords to make it sound sexy.

CBDC does not exist and is not well defined, but if you look at some of the current push for it in the West, e.g. The ECASH Act, then it should actually give consumers (who are already using digital payment systems) more privacy than what they currently have. Already our bank and VISA/MasterCard have our full transaction history, granted, at least in Europe there are strong privacy and data protection laws, but with a court order, the authorities would be able to access this. The only sensible “problem to be solved” I have seen about CBDC is to reduce the need for “private money” (i.e. consumer banks). As for authoritarian regimes, those are already scary. E.g. in China you can be subjected to random inspections of your phone (to check for VPN software and similar), you are only allowed to exchange 40,000 CNY into foreign currency per year, there are cameras everywhere with face recognition, and most social media traffic is monitored and censored. You really think CBDC is changing anything significantly? Similar with Russia, where expressing dissent on Telegram can land you a multi-year prison sentice.

I glanced over the report, I could not find a clearly defined problem that they wish to solve, in fact, it explicitly says “We hope that the Report will provide a better understanding of the use of DLT applications […]”. Not sure if it is the current report, that should provide this better understanding. It appears they have created a toy settlement system similar to BAHTNET, but based on “blockchain”, except blockchain is not actually good for this, so they introduced a notary service to work around probabilistic settlement, and some LSM oracle related to gridlocks. So it is a distributed system with two centralized authorities, what great progress! They do write about tokenizing all sorts of assets and then it could be possible to exchange these via the settlement system, but really, they could just do a BAHTNET 2.0 — for as long as I have been in Thailand, they have had instant interbank settlement via the latter.

In this case, a renter would actually be in worse situation, as they can be kicked out and have the fine deducted from their deposit. If it wasn’t because OP is about to sell, and JPM (apparently?) is threatening to not sign certificate of no debt, they could just ignore it.

What is the proper procedure if AGM does not approve the budget? Rational thing would be to call for an EGM where committee submits a new budget based on the feedback received at the AGM, but I don’t see this situation described anywhere.