Transcript of the above video:

For those who have watched this channel for about a month or so you might be well aware of the fact, I am pretty ambivalent to the point of I am actually pretty upset to the point of being almost afraid, maybe really, really concerned, I don't know what the right word is here but the notion of the War on Cash. This doesn't come from like a place of greed or something, "I want all the cash" or something, no it's about privacy. At the end of the day cash is fundamentally about privacy. All these issues associated with and all this discussion associated with Central Bank digital currencies cryptocurrencies, technology distributed ledger technology, block chain technology, all this stuff that pertains to like widespread public usage really concerns me because there are massive privacy implications to this that I don't think people are even understanding on a basic level. So let's get started here.

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Thais willing to share data to enable better online banking. First thing I will say there is "the road to hell is paved in convenience." I've seen this so many times throughout my life and I haven't been around that long but I have been around in a pretty interesting time to be around where I have watched a lot of what were once just kind of mundane things that people just dealt with become a convenience issue and then it has become kind of a data tracking issue. So for example where people once just called each other, now they text all the time. And they don't just SMS, they use chat apps. Well the apps are kind of mining all that data, you don't have any privacy much to speak of on those platforms. I am not talking about every platform, I know there are different platforms that do things different ways but the platforms that a lot of people use, the bulk of people use are probably mining a lot of your personal data through those chat apps. It is just a fact. And again, this is just me commenting, but yeah “the road to hell is paved in convenience”. That is just how I look at it. In any event, quoting this article, the title again is Thais willing to share data to enable better online banking, Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, quoting directly: "The majority of Thai consumers want a better digital banking experience with more than half willing to share and have their data collected by service providers to improve their experience, according to a recent survey. The "Bank of the Future" report conducted by Capco, a technology consultancy, found 89% of 890 respondents residing in Bangkok and surrounding areas want more efficient online banking services." Well, 890 people out of what 15 million in the Bangkok metro area? So, I mean a huge sample size, I just want to say. 890 respondents, love to know the backgrounds there especially is this is coming from a Technology Consultancy so presumably, I mean I don't know, I shouldn't say anything, but if I am going to run a survey, there is probably people in my near vicinity that I am going to run that survey by, I would think, one could presume there would at least be a disproportionate number of lawyers and legal professionals in a survey that I conducted, especially a survey with only 890 people in it. So just one man's opinion, I'm not calling anybody out on that. I am just simply saying I would love to know the data underlying this survey. I can tell you that whatever a majority, and I like how it's framed: "the majority of Thai consumers" and then you get down there and you find out well know it's 89% of 890 people, so less than a thousand people thought this was a good idea. I don't think it's a good idea obviously, that is why I am making this video because look, this is a privacy issue. It's not about cash and I am really getting tired of the constant refrain of 'money laundering' and this and that, No. No, we talked about this when they came down with "Oh, you need a Thai ID card to go to a cash deposit machine in Thailand because of anti-money laundering protection. Really? Because that is not how cash deposit machines work. People, like I say it is not Scarface, Al Pacino down at the deposit machine just like putting in logs of money like it is a wood chipper or something, that isn't it. I have watched people use CDMs here for years. Mostly they are people from the cash economy; yes they need to put their cash somewhere; it's usually their capital to run their small business is what you are usually dealing with but these are folks who are putting in somewhere between 1,000 and probably 10, maybe 20 max; 20,000 Baht into a cash deposit machine a year. 

So for those out there who are watching this who are foreigners, not Thais, we are talking somewhere between $30 and $600, that I mostly ever saw anyone use a CDM here in Thailand for, for the most part. There are exceptions to that, it was higher but as I said, it's cartoonish to think that Al Pacino from Scarface is out there just shooting logs of money into one of these CDMs. It is not ever been how it works. They don't even have the capacity to take all that money. I would kind of like to know what the maximum capacity a CDM machine can even take at a given time, in one transaction. I mean if you go in with a million Baht, do you have to do it like 100,000 Baht at a time? Nobody would want to do that. Again this whole thing has been sort of portrayed and framed as this major issue to go after nefarious characters. Well that is not really the case and then now it is kind of being framed as, convenience, convenience. Well, we have got digitized almost everything. It is pretty convenient. How much more convenient does it need to be? Honestly. At what point does convenience, I mean we have cards instead of cash now. You have even got these little things that you can just tap on things, they have just got to chip in them basically. I mean why do we need to get rid of cash? Why this huge push to get rid of cash? Where is this coming from and why? Because the only thing I see when you get rid of cash is just a loss of privacy. I don't see that it improves, I see a change in certain aspects of the banking system fundamentally, we have done videos on that but where is the improvement to society as a whole if we are now using payment tokens, which can only really be the name for it, that are tracked and traced everywhere. Where is the extra convenience in that because we have already got cash that we can basically do that with? You can do online purchasing, you can do anything right now with the system that we have. Why does it need to be changed and why does cash need to be destroyed?