Transcript of the above video: 

So going back a couple of years ago, I really got on a bent about the proposal of the so-called Digital Wallet. At the time, under the Government, at least ostensibly, of Srettha Thavisin they tried to roll out this Digital Wallet which they said, "well this is what we campaigned on." Well you didn't win, so a majority of people in Thailand didn't really want that, even if you note that it was one of the Party platforms. Me personally, I don't know anybody that was voting for it and then when we found out the terms of it - as I discussed at the time - it had a radius of usage; the money could be turned off, on, and off the money; the money had an expiration date, the "so-called money" could only be spent on certain things. I brought up as did others at the time, "what are we doing this for"? We're going into hundreds of billions of baht in national debt, increasing the debt to GDP ratio in order to create this thing and for what!? To just imprison ourselves in a totalitarian, tokenized monetary grid? I mean what was the benefit of that? That went away fortunately. That said, here it comes. It looks like, if you look at things in the totality of the circumstances, they are trying to bring it online still. I thought of making this video initially after reading a recent posting on X from Cointelegraph that's @Cointelegraph on X, quoting directly: "LATEST: Thailand's Central Bank is moving ahead with a 1:1 baht-backed stablecoin plan, with public hearings expected by year-end, per Bangkok Post." Well here's my input for the public hearings. How about we not do this? What is the point of this? What does this get us? We already have the ability to move baht digitally. What does creating a stablecoin do other than track and trace all of the people and all of the transactions associated with this? And on top of this, as I'll get you here in a moment, are we going to maintain an analog? Is there going to be something in the law that says an analog function must be maintained? Or is this just a quiet nudge over into the cattle-pen of totalitarian tokenization? Because it feels like the latter. 

Now I recently received an email from a viewer and this sort of dovetailed with the entire thing. I actually was thinking of making a video on this on its own, but I think when you see the totality of all of this, the totality of the circumstances if you will, you will see that it looks to me like they are still trying to bring this Digital Wallet online, and I don't think it's for anybody's benefit. That said, quoting from this recent email: "Ben, I will leave the expert analysis of this complex matter to you, but I just wondered isn't there one principle that we should advocate for. In any legal process where digital technology is used, there must be an analog method available for accomplishing the same outcome? This includes payments in cash, paper-based contracts, in-person interactions with government etc. In my opinion, all this digital technology should be optional, and opt-in, not optionally opt-out.” Yeah, I agree with that. I'm tired of all of this, "hey we are all automatically going on to all this stuff you never asked for, but you can go back to the old way if you feel like it." And then it's always, "well you can only go back to that for a little while" and then it's just going to be this new way. How about you leave us all alone, and just let us live our lives and stop trying to mess with our money? And really, I think if Thai people understand this at a fundamental level, as well as anybody around the world really starts to think about it, and you almost need to get your like "East Coast Wise Guy" attitude about this. "Are you messing with my money?" because that is what you are doing. You're trying to digitize how I transact with other people. You are messing with my livelihood. I almost want to make the thumbnail, I might even do it, I might make the thumbnail the scene from Joe Pantoliano in Risky Business with Tom Cruise, where he's Guido, he is Guido the killer pimp as one of his friends says in another part of that, he says, "never eff with another man's livelihood"! That is what we are seeing with this digitization of money. They are effing with all of our livelihood. They are effing with all of our money. And as we all know, eff around and find out. There will be ramifications for this. I don't want to see those ramifications. I don't want people all upset and angry a couple of years from now, when there's no velocity of money, there's no liquidity, everything is being tracked and traced. People can't do the business they want to do, they can't transact the way they want to transact, they basically cannot live their lives in a free manner. And there will be mobs and riots because of that. I don't want that. How about we just not do this? If you want to create these digital options, that's the other thing I find fascinating about all this digital money. It was initially rolled out some 15 years ago as "oh it's the big alternative. It's private. It's an alternative to the Fiat system. So, you don't have to worry about all of the problems and all of the oversight that comes with that except for the fact that now all these systems have way more oversight than the very system they were talking about 15 years ago as being the problem. This stuff is exponentially worse in so many ways. And the other thing about all this stuff being untraceable, Bitcoin, the privacy element of that. We have come to find out that was old just bunk. None of that was true. That said, quoting further: "The analog methods should be the default." Yeah, I agree. Now this person actually sent that with a link to this article attached from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: New electronic transactions law essential.

Before I jump into this real quick, I've had folks ask me, including folks like this that have sent me things, "Hey, how can we help you out? We know that you do this non-monetized. I don't necessarily need to avail myself of a lawyer or a law firm at this time." Obviously, this is promotional for the firm, but we do not monetize the channel and we do try to put out good information for the expat community. If you do sort of want to help us out, as I have discussed in other videos, my better half and I set up a restaurant here in downtown Bangkok. The name is Pancake Palace. As the name implies, it's American breakfast anytime; we do have an English breakfast on the menu. We also have American Diner style food: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, chilli dogs. We've got chilli bowls. We've got Buffalo wings. We've got chicken wings, we've got grilled cheese sandwiches, we've got Coke in glass bottles. If you are looking for some American Diner style food in downtown Bangkok, links are in the description below. 

Now that said, let's get into this: New electronic transactions law essential. Quoting directly: "The Electronic Transactions Development Agency (ETDA) is drafting a new electronic transactions law to replace the 2001 edition, aiming to strengthen trust in these interactions, facilitate their use, and improve the confidence of participants. These improvements are expected to enhance Thailand's competitiveness in a digital society, said the agency." Again, "replace the 2001 edition, strengthen trust in these interactions, facilitate their use and improve the confidence of participants." What does any of that mean? I don't feel unconfident in transacting with people here in Thailand. Adding on a digital element makes me less confident, makes me want to do those transactions less, frankly. Quoting further, and then I love - again how it's framed - these "improvements" - as if it is just a given that they are a positive. Quoting further: "An online public hearing on the draft was held from May 12 to June 15." So glad Bangkok Post let us know about that before it occurred! Quoting further: "The new law is scheduled to come into force 180 days after publication in the Royal Gazette, according to the draft. The new law does not apply to transactions that require people to show up in person in front of officials" - yeah, but it doesn't do anything to curb the various different agencies, business, government or otherwise, from just shutting down all of their analog functions and just saying, "oh now you have to use that." - Quoting further: "or transactions where people have to express consent in person in front of officials." - well watch them go in through the regulations and extract all of those things that require consent. I've watched this occur through the American bureaucracy up close and personal, especially the American bureaucracy that doesn't have to care about the people that deal with it i.e. the Immigration Bureaucracy, especially in matters pertaining to the National Visa Center as well as Embassies abroad. You are talking about people with virtually no rights. So you basically see the worst excesses of this digitization which is, no accountability, no ability to go talk to somebody to actually get things done, and instead ending up on a hamster wheel of a feedback loop of a digital interface that never seems to get anything done. Couple that with money that isn't even real, and what are we talking about? We are talking about an entirely fictitious system that is something straight out of Kafka. I mean you just end up in some constant feedback loop of being adjudicated as to whether or not you uploaded the right documentation. That's what it becomes. It doesn't become whether or not you should get the benefit, or whatever the certification or licensure is that you want. It's just "oh we don't like the way this thing looks! Upload it 16 more times with no effective difference between the upload." And then eventually it may work or it won't work. I've seen this happen with the new DTV. Basically, the online portal associated with processing visas through Thai Embassies and Consulates. I've seen it for going on a decade now in the US Immigration apparatus. I am really not looking forward to this in the context of the Thai bureaucracy because knowing how it already works, coupling this with that, this could very possibly create a worst-of-all-worlds outcome.

That said, quoting further: "or transactions that are inappropriate as e-transactions." Now watch as they shoehorn everything into "appropriate for e-transactions". Quoting further: "According to ETDA, the existing law does not sufficiently support the use of new technology by the public and businesses in conducting electronic transactions or providing related services because it requires compliance with rules set by the relevant authorities." How do you figure? I mean PayPal has been around since way after the early 2000s and it has been fine, and frankly the only thing that got messed up by PayPal was when the Government came in and started messing with it. And then we saw a decrease in liquidity, saw a decrease in velocity of money. There were less foreigners, especially walking around Thailand with money, than there were before they messed with that particular platform. Quoting further: "Meanwhile, globalization" - globalization, globalization, globalization! Who voted for globalization? I don't know about you, but I like being Thai; I am sure Americans like being Americans. This Global-is-stan, I don't know what country that is. Quoting further: "Meanwhile, globalization has led to more cross-border interactions, as large multinational companies providing electronic transaction services have effectively become standard-setters in practice." Well, yeah, that is what we want! We want to reinforce large multinational corporations as standard-setters? We want to lock them in even further while they are sucking out all of the sustenance from all of our nations' economies and trying to figure out the best way in which to extract wealth from all these different countries while paying in precisely as little tax as possible, which is exactly what they do. And then what they do is they come along and they create a bunch of tax rules ostensibly to go after them, but in reality, it just goes after the little guy i.e. Minimum Global Tax and the OECD's nonsense of offsetting and supranationalism in the context of tax. This a bad place we are going. This is Comintern levels of bad. I pray cooler heads prevail and see what this is for what this is and Thais back away from this stuff. This is not good. "If Thailand's electronic transactions law is not sufficiently flexible, it may be overlooked, or such companies may choose to limit their services in Thailand." The constant refrain. “If you don't get on board with the EU, you'll be left behind. If you don't get on board with whatever new global initiative it is, you'll be left behind”. Let me ask you something. Especially amongst Thais, and I know that are a substantial subset of Thai viewers that do speak English that watch these videos, and we do translate these really articulately into written Thai as well. But my question is in the past, during the Colonialism era, I mean would any Thai have bought into, "oh you will be left behind if you don't let the Union Jack fly over your country, or the tricolours of France fly over your country, you'll be left behind." Was anybody buying that then? Clearly, they weren't, because Thailand stayed uncolonized, Thank God. This colonization by digitization and supranationalism is as bad if not worse than that was, most notably because it's more pernicious. 

That said, quoting further: "The draft of the new laws based on consistency" - who was it? Was it Justice Hugo Black that said 'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'? I always loved that one. Quoting again: "The draft of the new law is based on consistency with international agreements" - Did anyone vote on those? What do they say? Why don't we revisit those? Again, these international agreements are sounding a lot more like the shackles and chains of colonialism than agreements. - "and relevant model laws," - model laws? - "though it introduces a different enforcement mechanism from the existing law." Yeah, what is that, and do we want that and did anyone vote for that? They are sliding this stuff in under the radar basically and very few people are seeing how this is coming about. Do we want this, Thailand? Any of this? Stablecoins? A new Electronic Transactions Law that is going to override everything we have been doing for the last quarter century. And there seems to be no oversight other than a few key technocrats getting this stuff through. 

Frankly, it's starting to remind me a lot of the way they tried to put gambling through in the last Government where nobody got to see the Act and the few things we got to see came from like Reuters and such. Again, foreign outside News Agencies and then what we do see is like, "hey, do we really even want this?" Quoting further: "The draft is designed to allow people to use new technologies for electronic transactions" - by the way, we don't need a law to allow people to use new technologies for transactions. It doesn't require a law. That's the con. That is where the chicanery is being pulled is the notion of, "oh, we can't do this without a new law." People can do whatever they want without a new law. There wasn't any new law when PayPal came out. It did wonders for Thai industry. It didn't need a law. Quoting further: "The draft is designed to allow people to use new technologies for electronic transactions without having to wait for the relevant agencies to prescribe detailed rules first." We didn't do that before. There were no new rules that came about when PayPal came online. - "The draft also abolishes the licensing, registration and notification mechanisms on e-transaction service providers." Okay, that's the carrot. "Oh, we are going to cut away this red tape", but then here's the stick. - "replacing them with a trustmark mechanism." What is that? What is that? Who is going to be in charge of that? Is it going to be one of these new private entities that is created sort of one step off from the Government? Again, we have seen this in the Work Permit system where they have this new private entity that sets up the appointments. Only all they actually do is just say, "we're only going to do X number of appointments". When it was the public, you could go up to the desk and be like, "hey I'm here, can I get my stuff done." Well, we only have X number, "hey, I'm here. Can I get our stuff done." That was the way it worked. Now they have put this buffer in the way where they are basically paying some private enterprise to basically tell you to go pound sand. They don't have the authority to do that as Government, but again they bootstrap it by putting a private interlocutor between you and the Government. So is that what this trustmark mechanism is going to be? Who's going to make the decisions on what that is? And how do they make those decisions? What's the criteria for that? Is it going to be a new bureaucracy that everything bottlenecks through in order to do any kind of transactions which heretofore have been freely done? That's what we saw since OECD got their meddling nose into our banking system here in Thailand. Stuff that we could do three years ago very easily, is now a cumbersome obstacle course to deal with in the current banking context. So what is this trustmark mechanism going to do for anybody? Quoting further: "These providers include the issuers of certificates for PDF files, the providers of digital signature systems, and cloud providers." So now they are going to become the intermediary for Thai's dealing with their own Governments; dealing with what heretofore had been very easy transactions to deal with person-to-person. None of this sounds good. A Stablecoin, a new law regarding transactions that frankly doesn't make a lot of sense.  

I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article from Bangkok Post in detail. New electronic transactions law essential. I don't even agree with the headline; I don't think it's essential. Frankly, I think we can get away with a lot of this or not get away with it, but we can deal with our own livelihoods without having all of these new laws, restrictions and protocols attached. That being said, it remains to be seen how this plays out. We will certainly be keeping you updated on this channel as the situation evolves.