Transcript of the above video:

So the title of this video not be immediately apparent what we are talking about, but long story short, this is another video talking about this so-called Digital Wallet, the CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) this whole digital money thing that they have been talking about here in Thailand and quite honestly I find quite Orwellian to say the least, but let's dive into this. We have also discussed, I made a video contemporaneously with this one, there also seems to be a concerted move towards so-called "digital passports" in an international travel context which if you would have talked about that like 3 years ago people would have called you crazy. I would have thought it was crazy and then we saw the back and forth regarding so-called vaccine passports which Thank God that never cottoned on particularly, especially domestically; I thought that was just ridiculous. But here we are where this is more and more sort of in the sort of general ether of the internet, the general discussion.

Now what kind of annoys me about this is one, I don't see any sort of grassroots, organic movement towards digital passports, digital currency, any of this stuff. And the way the media seems to be putting out this information is it is kind of put out there is it sort of either a benefit or a good thing or just sort of a neutral thing, but it's also put out there as if it is self-evidently inevitable that this is just going to happen because it's the way of the world. I am here to say I don't buy that one little bit. It is not self-evident that this sort of digital money protocol should be implemented; I think there are huge drawbacks to it, we have discussed that. Let me get into the analysis and we will go over it a little further. Quoting directly from a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Srettha brushes off digital wallet critics. Quoting directly: "The Government will press ahead with its 10,000 Baht digital currency handout scheme despite growing criticism, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said on Monday." First off, what are you talking about, “you are just pressing ahead?” For something of this magnitude it has to go through due process. So I have seen this multiple times, specifically the Bangkok Post, where they just say, "we are just going to do it. we are going ahead with it!" Well how about no? or, “How about let's have a discussion and let's promulgate this legally the way it should be, again pursuant to due process, rather than just you saying ‘we're going to pretty much just overhaul the entire monetary system and we're just going to go ahead with it, despite all your criticism’!" Which it is not an insignificant amount of criticism. As we have discussed in other videos and quoted directly from the Bangkok Post again, more than a hundred scholars have come out and said this is a real issue, this needs to be thought about. Come out, not against it but against a lot of it maybe is the right word to say that, look at the end of the day people have serious concerns about this and to just constantly keep saying, "well we are going to go ahead anyway!" That gets pretty annoying quite honestly, for lack of a better term. Quoting further: "Quote: "I insist the policy will go ahead. We are working on fine-tuning details regarding the source of funding for the scheme and how to use the handout system. Details are expected to become clear after a meeting of the sub-committee [steering the scheme]," Mr Srettha said.” So first of all, it is going to go ahead, but we don't really know what it looks like? That's like back in the US Congress when they said “we have to pass the Bill before we can read the Bill”. That is nonsense. We need to work this out; it needs to go through due process. You don't just get to change up the entire monetary system on a whim. Quoting further: "Earlier on Monday, Deputy Finance Minister, Julapan Amornvivat said that the Government has to trade carefully with the planned scheme to avoid any legal wrangle," - well I can think of a lot of legal wrangles. Even more interesting - "Quote: "he also admitted the Government had yet to find a way to fund the scheme." So we are just going to go ahead with it but we don't even have any money for it? Okay.

So then, the more I have read about this thing, the worse it sounds, honestly, okay? So the first time we heard about it, okay it is this digital thing; we are going to send folks money to their phone and they are going to use it; then they said "oh, you can only use it within four kilometers". Then we saw, I was reading another article which I didn't cite for this video where they actually said there was another system that was utilized during COVID and I remember that system, it actually already exists that 40 million people's data is already in but they apparently don't want to use that system, they want to create their own. Why I do not know. I also like that it is not exactly in any specific publication been said that it is cheaper to do it this way, but it has been implied I have noticed that it is, "oh well by doing it digitally it is going to be cheaper." Well, the number they keep talking about is 560 billion which when they first started talking about that and this is Baht by the way, when they first started talking about that, the way I read it is that was just for the infrastructure to be built. That wasn't for the money itself to be handed out which if you go back from where they raised the debt ceiling from 60 to 70% of debt-to-GDP ratio, they said, well it looked to me like they were going to take the rest of that 1.5 trillion which is what the amount that raising from 60 to 70% of debt would do to the country, and they were going to take 560 billion of it just to implement the infrastructure and the other roughly 700 million of it or 700 billion of it or thereabouts, would be the actual money that went to people because there is about 71 million Thais in Thailand and each of them getting 10,000 Baht a piece, that is roughly what it would come out to. And then they have changed it and all the numbers have now become all obfuscated, it is very murky as to how much exactly is going to get paid, they came out and said "well only poor people will get it then." Well it is like you are putting the whole nation in debt, so that didn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. In any case again, again the more I read into this the less I like it. 

And to that point, quoting directly, again from the Bangkok Post, this article is titled: Govt's cash bonus to be paid through 'super app'. In there they get into all the app issues, that alone is creepy but this quote to me said it all. Quoting directly: "Vendors who are not part of the formal tax system cannot convert the money in the digital wallet into cash, but they can use the balance to make purchases from others in the tax system." So this isn't money. This isn't money in any sense of the term that we have known to this point. Once you go into this system, there is no coming out in any meaningful sense, because as they say right here, it's not cash and it's not convertible back to cash. So what is it?

Again, I have said it before and I don't really like using this language but I mean the last time we saw anything like this was out of the Soviet Union, at least in the Western context and the Soviet Union, and Russia has always, are they western, are they eastern, they are kind of both but yeah the Soviet Union, Russia has Western culture, so that was the last time we saw it in the context of like Europe for example, anything near this. Meanwhile people have compared it to China's system; well social credit? That is what we want? Where we are all tracked and traced, and all of our transactions are tracked and traced and on top of it, they control the money. As they said in one of the prior things we cited, they said "well you can only use it within 4 kms." “Well no, no, okay it's not! We may be able to take it out to the tambon level or we can take it out to the province level". Well that means you can push it back down to 4 km. or less; you could make this money unusable geographically if you wanted to. And again, these are the exact notions that Thailand has stood against throughout the 20th century and stands against now I would like to think. It's one of the reasons I moved here; it's one of the reasons I live here is because these notions are antithetical to the notion of being Thai itself because to be Thai, means to be free. The notion that again: "Quote: "vendors who are not part of the formal tax system cannot convert the money in the digital wallet into cash." That is the antithesis of being free. And again going back to this implication that this digital system is cheaper, I just can't believe in my heart of hearts that it is cheaper to implement a 560 billion Baht digital system than it would have been to just print the bank notes. How much would it cost to just print these banknotes, which has its own problems? It debauches the currency, all kinds of inflation, the same analysis that I have done on the economic side of it which I will gloss over that, we've already talked that out, but okay there is inflation and all of those problems associated with just printing the money, but if we just printed the money, physically printed the money, how much would that actually cost? I am sure a number can be procured for that and I am sure it is far less than 560 billion Baht. And then meanwhile, if you just printed the money okay, you have problems with inflation and all of that good stuff but you don't have this overarching surveillance state that's looking at every economic transaction of each individual that is operating within the Kingdom. So where is the major benefit to this program? At the end of the day, I just fail to see it.