Transcript of the above video: 

This video is probably something of a change for folks that watch this channel with any kind of regularity, and I do appreciate the people that do watch with regularity, I never really thought that would ever happen. But I have also noticed that we have discussed certain issues, that more and more the videos that are coming out on this channel that are the usual stuff we've been making, they are veering in directions where we are talking about issues more and more. I kind of want to continue to keep the kind of nuts and bolts kind of topics that we've been discussing with the regular videos going largely the way they have been. What that largely means for viewers though is there is just going to be more of me talking which if you enjoy that, I hope you enjoy what we continue to make. But yeah, I'm going to try to make some longer form videos from here going forward on some of these topics rather than just sort of chunk through them sort of in littler bite-sized increments, because some of the things that are being discussed here I think really warrants serious attention.

There's still this discussion regarding these Digital Wallet Tokens. I recently did a video where we discussed the fact that I liken them to Digital Wallet Tilapia because like the Tilapia fish that are eating up many of the naturally existing fish here in Thailand, these Digital Wallet Tokens as a result of what is sort of referred to euphemistically as Gresham's Law, it's going to have a very similar effect. Then I've heard out in the ether of the internet there's this sort of reverberating clang if you will of the notion that well "Digital Money it stimulates better somehow because it moves faster", or something. I don't know what the underlying thinking behind that is because we know economically, cash has the most velocity of anything in the currently existing money supply. If you just hand people cash, believe me it moves quick. That's why Central Banks monitor inflation as assiduously as they do. And again, some of these things that I'm hearing in argument for these Digital Wallet Tokens, it's very specious reasoning at the end of the day and again, when you couple it with this notion that Thailand is in desperate need of stimulus that would completely gut the budget of the nation, it really again, I don't see where the cost-benefit lines up. I just don't see where the possible problems from this, and there is a Pandora's box like element to this whole issue because we frankly don't know; we've never seen in the history of time what it would be like to create digital currencies and then see if they chase away the good money, again per Gresham's Law - bad money chases off good. And bad money is money that you can't spend on whatever you want; you can only spend it within a certain parameter geographically or a certain time frame. Again that's not money I particularly want. The other one is the counter, the sort of contra if you will argument to that is also "well no digital money would have a really high velocity because there would be those who would go to people willing to buy it and sell it quickly, they transact it away in order to get cash." That's the other thing that again I don't think many people are thinking about when it comes to the issue of these Digital Wallet Tokens. The thumbnail we used for this video was I actually made the meme, it's from The Sopranos where Paulie Walnuts, it's a pretty good episode, kind of comedic, is running this feast and one of the vendors is griping at him that they do things differently in Ohio. He basically says “yet another reason I don't live in Ohio”. And I've heard people talking recently like "well China's system works." Well great. That's China, yet another reason I don't live in China. And I wouldn't say it works, I would say they just have had it imposed upon them and they are getting along as best they can. 

This Digital Wallet Token thing it scares me because it is truly totalitarian in nature. This is not a partisan thing; this is not even really an ideological thing. It just comes down to 'do you really want all financial transactions to be surveilled down to the micro-est of micro levels?' I mean I think Europe is absurd at this point with this notion that well anything more than a 1,000 Euro cash is something we need to really be; no if I was living over there, I would say "no, you need to leave me the heck alone and get out of my business". I don't know where this notion of privacy being an inherently bad thing came from, but it's a bad notion. It's not a good idea. Privacy is very important. That's why it's enshrined in many legal documents. And, I hate that specious argument that privacy isn't mentioned in the First Amendment or in the Constitution and the founding documents including the Bill of Rights because yeah, okay, its notions are mentioned. What are we playing? Kids games now that the actual work ‘privacy’ isn't used, therefore there's no privacy? The fourth amendment is quite clear. Persons, papers and effects. Privacy was very important to anybody in the Enlightenment Era or what was called the Revolutionary Era in the United States. It was one of the main things they were going after and if it's not clear now that these Digital Wallet Tokens are the end game of what has been a long game of eroding privacy across the board, across jurisdictions, across the world, if it's not clear to people at this point what this is, I don't know what to do for you. Because if everything you will ever do is going to be surveilled by this financial grid, this database that, they're already saying, we've done the videos on this, they're already saying, the fines associated with traffic violations are going to be attached to it. This is dystopian; it's really creepy stuff. I mean again who wants this too? Who is out here clamouring for this? This is one of those that I find it interesting because the narrative on it, they don't even really get into how popular it is. I've noticed that as we have trudged along post-COVID with all of this continuing totalitarianistic just continuing narrative of totalitarianism, just this kind of ongoing thing, they stopped talking about popularity particularly in the narrative because quite honestly no one's out there clamouring for it other than the money. Yes of course, there's going to always be large groups of people - myself included - who if you're going to give me a check for nothing, I'll take it sure. Who really wouldn't? That's basically human nature, so that element of it is easy to explain. But the totalitarian nature of the platform itself, not that easy to explain and not that necessary.

The other thing is we have historical precedent for what happens in the circumstances. The final decade of the Soviet Union, if nothing else, can be our guide. There's a great book on this called the Oligarchs where it talks about the end of the Soviet Union and how their banking system operated much like this, only they didn't have the digital technology yet so they still had to use paper rubles, at least to some extent but still the economic principles at play still apply. And by the way, those who say "well they could chase off cash," this, that and the other thing, they could do it, it could be done, it could be imposed sort of by fiat, but it will only backfire. People will just go over into some other method of trade, method of barter especially in this era. Bitcoin, other types of privacy based cryptos to name just a few not to mention golden and silver which are really easy to use, and especially here in Thailand where the Thai gold market being what it is. Thai gold is a great alternative I could see in a sort of a "shadow economic situation". It would be terrible for Thailand to bifurcate her economy that way. We've seen it happen before. It literally collapsed the Soviet Union via their banking system - the differentiation between paper rubles and ledger rules. Digital Ledger Technology is the exact terminology that the IMF used when they first discussed this back in I believe 2018. In the White Paper they talked about Digital Ledger technology. Ledger rubles versus cash rubles, that difference is what drove the wedge through the entirety of the Soviet system. And I'm not some expert on that I just read that one book at a financial level, I want to be very clear at a financial level, that was what had this this effect on that economy. Many other factors contributed to problems in the Soviet Union by the way. I am just simply bringing up the fact that when you create this two tier, this Ledger type currency and this non-ledger type currency, cash versus this other thing, bad things have been known to happen.

Suffice it to say on the economic side I don't think it's a great idea again I'm just the purely, I hate the term, I don't hate the term "libertarian" but I just like freedom and liberty, whatever that is. Just from that argument, do we really want all of our transactions surveilled? I don't think it's a good idea.