As far as I remember, the country sets a limit for this. Once a "pseudo" currency reaches that amount (in circulation), it is required to be "authorized" (or not) by the country.
Now that was before bicoin existed. So, probably the laws will soon be re-written to take that into account.
I'm not sure it is in their long term strategic interest to push bitcoin underground since that will make bitcoin far harder to tax (declining tax revenues -> increasing taxes and decreasing State power -> more people hiding income = the Greek Syndrome).
It doesn't necessarily matter if it's harder to tax. If the only way to exchange Bitcoins for currency is via face-to-face transactions, 90% of what usefulness it has is eliminated. The remaining use, exchange of a virtual currency for virtual goods and services, is only useful with an easy way to get ahold of a sum of said virtual currency to begin with.
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.
Liquidity is obviously a good thing for a currency, and on the surface this is obviously a bad thing (at least for Bitcoin users in Thailand), but it's definitely not the key factor to the success of Bitcoin. In fact, a lot of the driving force behind the Bitcoin community is counter-economics (e.g. black markets) and the desire for an alternative to government currencies. In that context, governments outlawing Bitcoin may very well be a positive thing for Bitcoin, because it could be perceived as vindication of the need for currencies which are free from governments.
The difference between your examples is the reserve currency status of the dollar. Bitcoin doesn't enjoy this status. If there was an Edict banning Thais from owning or dealing in Icelandic Kronur (say because some Icelander had insulted the monarchy, which Thais are notoriously touchy about) then it would probably last extremely well. Banning the australian dollar (a larger currency, from an economy geographically closer to Thailand) is harder to guess; you probably couldn't ban it completely but it might remain hard-to-find.
Putting BTC and the USD on the same plane for comparison is likely to result in errors.
Unfortunately, making child porn illegal is a waste of time if the goal is to protect children from abuse. In reality, though, "protecting children" is a banner under which people grab more abusive power. In my view, everyone who is actively fighting with tertiary effects of a social problem is either stupid or plain evil.
Especially receiving bitcoin would be hard to detect. You can receive bitcoins without owning a computer. Wallet on pendrive or in encoded attachment to some email on your email account is enough.
Bitcoin is a tool. It is useful for some things, and it is not useful for others.
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 is more than a virtual currency or miners running rigs. It's the first self-sufficient, decentralized, monetary system that renders 3rd party entities like banks obsolete.
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.
What I find is that people consider "saying anything offensive" to be an ad-hominem attack, but completely omit very common forms of ad-hominem attacks such as attacks on supposed ideology or bringing or other views and arguing that their views are contradictory -- or arguing against another viewpoint that they hold -- in an attempt to refute their views.
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.
I am from Brazil, I remember that in early 1990s here you was the coolest kid in the school if you showed up with a dollar bill (even a 1 USD one).
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).
For what it's worth, I see identical behavior with stock market enthusiasts as well. Good job numbers? Market goes up. Bad job numbers? Market goes up -- clearly Ben Bernanke must keep printing until employment stabilizes. "A" is good for the stock market and so is "!A." It really is a crazy time we live in. Cognitive dissonance everywhere you look.
There's nothing necessarily crazy about what you describe. The markets reaction to news that everyone knows is going to be released (that is, we know job numbers will be published at this time on that day, but not what the numbers will be) won't necessarily track the good-ness or bad-ness of the news, because the market will have moved in advance based on the best estimates of those playing that game, and they might have overshot.
I don't see how the issues are linked. Do they simply stem from a common philosophy, or does a disbelief in information ownership somehow entail inability to punish for possession?
The way I see it, information possession and ownership are the same thing, and neither concept should be recognized by the law.
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.
And so it begins. Thailand is a drop in the ocean, once the US and other countries get on-board then the success of Bitcoin is only going to be further propelled. I presume most Bitcoin transactions will go underground and given their anonymous and decentralised nature, good luck enforcing laws like this or even being able to draw conclusive proof of Bitcoin usage to a particular entity (unless you find other proof like receipts, emails or having the Bitcoin client on your computer).
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?
There is NO reason to bring racist stereotypes into the conversation. The Thai government has many many faults, but being soft on child-sex is not one of them. Thai people love their children as much as anyone else in the world. In fact the United States has poured millions into countries like Thailand and Cambodia to conduct paedophile witch hunts which have railroaded a number of innocent people when they couldn't find the hoards of sex-fiends that people like you think are lurking in the shadows.
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).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadNow that was before bicoin existed. So, probably the laws will soon be re-written to take that into account.
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.
Putting BTC and the USD on the same plane for comparison is likely to result in errors.
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.
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.
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.
"To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures"
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).
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.
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.
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?
The only reason I can think of is so that they say no, and you get some free publicity?
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).