Bitcoin ruled illegal in Thailand
bitcoin.co.th
bitcoin.co.th
In other words the title "Bitcoin ruled illegal in Thailand" should be changed to "Bank of Thailand wishes Bitcoin to be illegal", or "Trading suspended due to Bank of Thailand advisement" which is the original title.
The only reason I can think of is so that they say no, and you get some free publicity?
Thanks I was just about to write that.
This story smells. If you go up to some officials in Thailand and ask them whether or not something is legal, they'll say it's illegal.
No laws have been passed that would make BTC illegal, and nobody has been charged with BTC related activity. So I'd say at this point, it's perfectly legal.
Might be just a stunt to get attention?! Viral marketing?
This is definitely bad news for bitcoins.
[Edit] Will a down-voter kindly explain to me how this is good news for bitcoins? Maybe liquidity is not important for a currency?
Its bad news for bitcoin, but it is very minor bad news. Bitcoin only needs to be legal in the US or Europe for it to work world wide eventually.
Just imagine a time 30 years from now and a company wants to manufacture something in Thailand (lets say it is product as big as the iPhone was in the early 10's.) and that company would like to pay in Bitcoins. Do you think that that government of Thailand is going to keep up their ban?
Of course not, if Bitcoins get big in a few other countries, that is all that matters.
[Edit] Taiwanese replaced with Thailand. Not sure how I made that error.
Especially in countries with highly inflatonary currencies, or countries with strong currency controls, the black market demand for Bitcoin could be huge.
Of course, US currency is used because it's more stable than the local currency (which bitcoin probably isn't) and it's physical, you can't block it by blocking network traffic.
I'm only comparing the group dynamic and the hostile reaction to any suggestion that triggers cognitive dissonance. I haven't checked the chart on Mt Gox in ages, last I saw 1 BTC was ~ 125 USD. As a disinterested observer, this Thailand development doesn't seem very important one way or the other, but it's hard to interpret as positive.
Given all the financial scandals and outright fraud that have been revealed over the years, you still feel that legitimate concerns of gold investors are nothing more than wild conspiracy theories?
We can get a sense of how successful and lasting this edict will be with a simple mental experiment: replace "Bitcoin" with "US Dollar." The edict thus becomes: "the following US Dollar activities are illegal in Thailand: buying US Dollars; selling US Dollars; buying any goods or services in exchange for US Dollars; selling any goods or services for US Dollars; sending US Dollars to anyone located outside of Thailand; receiving US Dollars from anyone located outside of Thailand." How successful could that edict be, and how long could it last, realistically?
Foreign exchange controls are normally difficult to implement and enforce. Control of Bitcoin -- a decentralized, optionally anonymous, virtual commodity -- should be even more difficult.
I suspect a lot of Bitcoin trading volume in Thailand will simply go underground.
Make no mistake, even if governments can't stop people trading bitcoin, they can stop it becoming mainstream in the way many BTC enthusiasts seem to want.
Which is to say, with a sufficiently low volume of BTC being passed around, taxing it becomes as important as making sure you tax cash transactions by roadside fruit vendors or lemonade stands.
We had a 2000% inflation, and one of the government attempts to fix it was currency controls. (the fix in the end, was create a new currency that had fixed 1:1 rate with USD, and leave it 1:1 for some years until the 1998 crisis made it necessary to decouple them).
EDIT: Also, it seems that this is not an actual prohibition. Rather, it is merely a legal advisory memo from the national Bank of Thailand to a Bitcoin company regarding the current legal status of Bitcoin transactions in Thailand. According to the BoT, Bitcoin transactions may not be legal under the current law, so the BoT will not provide banking services to individuals or companies that will use the services for Bitcoin-based transactions or services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
There are already many limitations on currency, this can last as long as the others.
This is actually arguably good news for Bitcoin. The government of Thailand sees it as a feasible way to bypass currency controls.
Putting BTC and the USD on the same plane for comparison is likely to result in errors.
- Buying Bitcoins
- Selling Bitcoins
- Buying any goods or services in exchange for Bitcoins
- Selling any goods or services for Bitcoins
- Sending Bitcoins to anyone located outside of Thailand
- Receiving Bitcoins from anyone located outside of Thailand
The point is that the initiators of the discussion were a company seeking information about operating as a financial-services company. It wasn't a police-initiated operation, like a raid on an individual buying things with Bitcoin, or something of that sort.
Why not? From what little I understand it's pretty easy to spot bitcoin related traffic on a network, transactions in particular. Thailand already has some sort of national filtering/porn censorship set up IIRC.
Receiving via offline wallet would be completely untraceable, unless the addresses were know a priori by the authorities. Checking the balance on a web-based blockchain viewer could tip off the watchers, but the same precautions apply here as for the above case.
I'm sure there are ways to secure the traffic. As it stands, however, running your own node, mining, and sending BTC is pretty detectable.
The important thing here is that the receive-only scheme provides a way around two of the six points mentioned by dreen above: selling goods/services for Bitcoin and receiving Bitcoin from anyone outside the country.
Actually, from that list it looks like running a node and mining would not be illegal. And if you're mining with a pool, make sure the payout is added as part of the generation transaction, not sent as another transaction later.
In terms of bitcoin crossing borders and for the purposes of international commerce - where is a bitcoin?
If someone in the US pays someone in thailand you would (or I would) immediately think a cross border transaction has taken place. But Bitcoins only really exist on the blockchain, right? You don't somehow store them on your own machine, only the means of accessing them (keys in your wallet). And the block chain is everywhere. A transaction is a mathematical change of ownership from one key to another, a wallet merely a collection of keys and previous transaction records (the latter probably able to be rebuilt from the blockchain anyway)...
So did any bitcoin cross a border?
It seems to me hard to enforce in some western countries.
How can you enforce people not to buy or sell something, unless you decide it's a scam.
Regulations could be enforced, I suppose, the same way short-selling can be 'paused' in situation in which the market is going crazy or volatility is too high. But unless you use these loopholes I am not sure it would be possible.
Does anyone know of ways to enforce such a thing in the states? Or in any of the western european countries?
Drugs, weapons, precursors/ingredients for those things.... Certainly some of the worst and most controversial parts of modern legal codes in the west, but governments ban stuff they don't like all the time.
Where you're dealing with financial instruments, there is just so much law in place already that it seems to me it would be almost impossible to make a business using Bitcoin and not fall foul of some law somewhere.
Either you say that something is dangerous (as in your example, drugs, weapons... etc), or it has to be considered a scam.
I may be wrong and I would like to understand this better, but I don't see how they can declare it illegal to buy unless they find a loophole (money laundry, etc).
But just saying you're not allow to buy it, without associating with it a motivation (which could eventually be challenged via various Courts), doesn't see easy to me in the US.
They can't even manage to ban weapons really.
"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures"
Really necessary to drag that in to the discussion?
edit: why the downvote? It's a simple question!
To use a real example I recently saw: "Russ Feingold said the Patriot Act violates the 4th amendment, voted against it, and says we should repeal it; however, Feingold sponsored the McCain-Feingold act -- parts of which were found to have violated the first amendment -- so his argument against the Patriot Act is invalid because he and other liberals also violate the constitution". This is an example of not only an ad-hominem, but also false equivalence, and to-quoque -- but yet I see these arguments commonly asserted and unchallenged.
For the record I do think the grand-parent comment does not constitute a particularly strong argument to me: there's no proof that Thailand fails to punish paedophiles any more than any other country (keep in mind these kind of crimes are grossly under-reported) and even if that is indeed the case, there's no proof that the same dynamic would mean laws against bitcoin would not be enforced.
There is also some misunderstanding about who declared bitcoin illegal. The Central Bank deals specifically with monetary transactions - and they were asked for their opinion by a private company, and they gave that company their opinion.
That is the extent of what happened. The government of Thailand is not on a crusade against bitcoin.
I don't think the political will exists, in either case - the political jockeying that currently stands in for the entire totality of both policy and political discourse doesn't leave much space for a quiet and novel campaign like this - I suspect, in fact, that the only thing that has fallen into the above category within the last ten years are CITES violations (drug stings should probably be credited to the DEA.)
Normally, everything not expressely illegal should be allowed - and not the other way around.
This is not to say that the story makes Thailand look good. The ruling elite have a strong tendency to blame many things on foreigners, and since coming out against Bitcoin will effect practically no one in Thailand (which is not exactly a hotbed of Bitcoin usage) they get to blame another imagined foreign threat to the Kingdom and take credit for saving the country. Remember, they made a similar stance against, Open Source Software, not long after the military coup not that many years ago (and like Obama in Egypt, the Bush administration illegally continued to give them military aide without anyone in America even noticing).
At the very least it's an intriguing concept in relation to sociology, economy, and new forms of governance. It's a paradigm shift, and as such, it will meet a lot of misunderstanding and opposition. Particularly from those whose power is at stake - banks and governments.
As once, the idea of equality and democracy shook the kingdoms during the Enlightenment, the idea of Bitcoin, if you look closely, is not far from it.
How does banning bits in any way shape or form, prevent their transmission and storage?
What does it mean to possess bits? Do they have to be on a physical media on my property? What if I have a network drive? Do they have to be on a server that I have access to? Does that mean that we're all in possession of everything that is made public on the Internet?
There are ways to answer these questions, but I'm not convinced that we have anything to gain from the government doing so.
The huge-ass 400 pound 6"5 bolybuilder of the 11, bans the use of bitcoins.
3 guys defiantly continue to trade in bitcoins.
The other 7 are not so sure -- they rather stay legal.
When the gorilla guy caughts wind of one the traders, he smashes their heads with a hammer and/or throws them in jail. This make 7 other guys even more reluctant, and even makes 1 of the remaining 2 traders to rethink his actions.
Makes sense? Substitute the gorilla guy with law enforcement.
EDIT: ...which probably means that sooner or later, bitcoin will probably be outlawed everywhere.
For example, the Chiemgauer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer
In most cases, using a different medium of exchange is legal. For example, a merchant can accept Euros if they choose.
Now that was before bicoin existed. So, probably the laws will soon be re-written to take that into account.
Thailand is already so corrupt laws are basically meaningless there. If you get caught somehow trading coins then just bribe the cop $100 and walk away.
What about Thaicoin a currency backed by bitcoin?
Any country who prohibits, like any country who prohibits any tool, it is putting their residents at a disadvantage. By definition. In those situations where the nail is a Bitcoin, Thai people will have no hammer, but a wrench with which to bang the nail in.
The beauty of Bitcoin is it only needs to thrive in one of the 200+ countries in the world for it to achieve Proof of Concept status. And once it does that, other countries will follow, and eventually any countries who prohibit it will need to allow it to stay competitive.
Bitcoin == Tax evasion
No campaign exists, and there exists no space to whip one up considering how thoroughly split the various arms of government are between political allegiances (unless Yingluck's dealt with the judiciary already.)
Thailand might be more sensitive to currency issues than other countries.
They were told to float their currency on the international market and it backfired horribly in the 1990's.
I can see why they would want to be worried about currency manipulations again.
And I agree with the other comments on here which say that this will drive trade (in Thailand at least) underground.
Disclaimer: I'm bullish on bitcoin.
Switz might be an exception, or Iceland perhaps, but both too constrained by neighbours and political bonds.