Actually, no.  I am not an expert in Thailand's laws.  I don't think anyone in this thread is.

However, so far as I can tell, they said no such things.  It seems that OP asked the Bank of Thailand for an affirmative statement that these activities are legal.  He suspended activities based, assuming everyone has been truthful, on the Bank of Thailand's NOT stating affirmatively that his actions are legal.  They appear, in fact, to have reserved judgment for another time.

There does not appear to be any statement that any of these activities are illegal.  While OP has possibly done us a long-term service in prodding the Bank of Thailand to provide some regulatory certainty so that business can continue, he might also have simply recklessly prodded a scary state entity to make a bad, hasty decision.  I guess we'll see in a week or two.  I'll judge the action by its results.

But nothing in Thailand that has any power to make laws has actually said Bitcoin is illegal.  Goat is completely right on that part.  The Bank of Thailand might or might not say that really soon, but it just hasn't yet.  And if a central bank says something with legal significance, it says it on paper.

Is there even a company?  Has anyone found anything resembling corporate records for BFL even being a corporation? 

Where is it incorporated?  Delaware?  Anywhere?  The lack of any kind of corporate entity would be quite disturbing.  It would indicate nobody involved with this whatever-it-is even has assets worth protecting, i.e. that the whole thing is judgment-proof.

Glad I don't have a dog in this hunt, because I'd be pretty scared if I did.

He's a degenerate addict.  Poker is full of degenerate addicts.  The vast majority of degenerates are entirely welcome at any poker table because they are the living example of a free lunch.  So is this dude, but he is literally so disgusting that the free money he throws away on poker (that he usually stole from other players in the first place) does not make his presence welcome.  He is the vile, Sterno-eating, puking excuse for a human who stinks up the room just by walking into it who even Seals With Clubs banned.

Seals is a horde of degenerates and scumbags (and I LOVE it for that), but this guy is so vile he is unwelcome even there.  Ponder that.

Not actually true, although casinos in particular are always in the business of offering -EV wagers.

Simple explanation of EV.  The perfect example of a 0 EV bet is flipping a coin where whoever calls it wins $1.  If the coin is fair, that is, lands on heads or tails equally often, if you flip it a million times, you can basically expect to break even.  If you flip it a billion, or a trillion times, the results will converge toward breaking even.  The equation for that is simple.  50 percent of the time, you win, 50 percent of the time, you lose, and you win or lose $1 every time.

So (.5*1) + (.5*-1).  .5 - .5 = 0.

Now, rig the coin a bit.  49% of the time you win and 51% of the time you lose.

(.49*1) + (.51*-1).  .49 - .51 = -0.02.  So, betting a dollar each time, you will lose $0.02 on average.  Keep doing this, and you will keep losing.  It doesn't sound like much money, but Las Vegas is built on odds like this, converging toward the expected value over billions upon billions of trials.

A blackjack game with very favorable rules to the player actually has a house edge less than .5%.  That means the house would profit less than half a cent for every dollar bet.  Most games are vastly more unfavorable to the player.  Shit like slots can be as bad as 10% house edge or worse, though some jurisdictions have laws against this kind of flat-out ripoff.

However, basically any time you have a wager where the EV is positive, the opposite rule applies.  Whereas when you make a negative EV bet over and over, you are simply going to lose more and more money, when you make a positive EV bet over and over, your results will converge on positive, if you can play long enough.  There is also a related concept called "risk of ruin," which is the odds that even on a +EV wager, you will lose your entire bankroll anyway.  There is also a concept called the Kelly Criterion, which is worth Googling, which is an aggressive bankroll-maximizing strategy for deciding the proper bet size, based on your precise EV edge and bankroll size, to use to make money fast.  Most consider the pure Kelly strategy to be overly aggressive and risky, but most also use some variation on the concept.  When I use a Kelly-ish betting strategy, it is generally betting about half what the pure Kelly strategy would imply, but very quickly backing off if it starts to endanger my bankroll.

In any event, the concept of EV is absolutely essential to advantage playing and actually making money.  Every -EV bet you make is a loser.  Even if you win that particular bet.  If you make -EV bets over the course of a career, you're just plain going to lose money.  Maybe not on any particular day, but over the long run, if you even get there without going flat broke.  If you make +EV bets, you are going to make money over the long run.  You still have the possibility of going broke, but if you actually reach the long run, you're going to make money and keep making money.

Making money gambling is really, ultimately, a very simple thing to do.  Just do the math and know what the EV is of every bet you make, or at least have the intuitive skill to know when a bet is +EV and when it is not.  Have a grasp of the concept of "risk of ruin," especially if you have a limited amount of money (and who doesn't).  

I think the most obvious thing about this exposition is that casinos do not build all those fancy buildings by offering gamblers +EV wagers, at least on purpose.  They build those buildings by taking money from people willing to make horrible wagers at horrible odds for the fun of it.  Or because they're preying on addicts.  I'd have a moral judgment here, but I can't really afford one.  Most of my profits gambling have been on poker, where to be utterly frank about it, the profits are to be made by preying on addicts.

During the years when gambling was my largest source of income, I was also lucky enough to have a part-time to full-time job where I could basically choose my own hours and my own work.  So if I was having a bad week (or just sick of it), I could do real work.  Basically, I was in a pool of people who transcribed court and legislative hearings like House of Representatives committee hearings or Social Security disability hearings.  While I had a general policy of never refusing the higher paying overnight assignments to maintain a reputation for being a reliable go-to guy for those, otherwise, I did what I wanted when I wanted.

I kept meticulous records so I could claim every possible deduction and paid self-employment taxes (and anyone who does not is a fool if they have significant gambling income because this kind of income basically begs for a tax audit).  You absolutely have to keep track of losses if you want to itemize them as deductions, and if you don't, you end up in the awful position of owing taxes on all your winnings while being able to deduct none of your losses.  (I once knew a poker player who went around to the horse track to pick up losing tickets for this purpose, but I personally wouldn't recommend breaking the law.)

There is also the option, for a winning player who is not approaching it as a business, of reporting it as some kind of hobby income.  The law is actually somewhat unclear on how to go about this.

So that is yet another issue about gambling as a profit-making activity.  You can beat the house rake and still end up getting screwed by the much scarier government rake.  A Vegas loan shark has nothing on the IRS.  (I would actually use slightly unfavorable accounting methods and overpay on the gambling-related income.  The purpose of this is that if they did audit me, they'd end up owing me money, and if they ever did it again, I could warn them at the outset that fucking with me would again result in them owing ME money and do you really want to do that?  Apparently, my paper was legit because they never did.)

Anyway, yet another unglamorous reality issue with gambling for a living.  At the end of the tax year, you end up with tax returns that you can't even pay an accountant to do because they're such a nightmare.

These being the games where collusion is most deadly, without strongly enforcing anti-collusion rules, you're going to have games full of cheaters.  Each cheating player gets to know four hole cards so even three cheaters know twelve cards between them.  Plus the pot-limit structure makes it a lot easier for cheaters to whipsaw the chump in between.  There are a lot of situations where in a no-limit game, a player would simply shove, but in pot-limit, it's not suspicious to raise less than all-in, since you actually can't. 

It is no wonder under these circumstances that these games are dead.  An honest player is a complete sitting duck.  While Seals has been pretty good about compensating players for this kind of shit, it has basically been on the players to catch the cheats.  You might get your money back, but there is just no fun in playing what may be a crooked game.  I don't know how sites like Stars handled this internally back in the day, and frankly, I saw some pretty suspicious PLO/PLO8 action even there from time to time, but maybe they need some kind of full-time "cop" watching the action.  To nail down cheats in any reasonable length of time (without losing stack after stack to them), you either need blatantly fishy action (which a good cheat won't give you) or real-time monitoring of hands. 

I certainly wouldn't assume nobody is cheating in the NLHE games but it gets the cheats less of an advantage and, for whatever reason, most NLHE cheats seem to really suck at poker and lose anyway.

The problem isn't really getting a judgment in a case of blatant fraud like this, but collecting against a bunch of fucking bums.  Look at the principals of BFL.  Convicts, trolls, just a bunch of fucking losers.  What are the odds any of these clowns have assets to collect?

Yet, do it long enough, and the odds of a martingale totally failing approach 100%, for any bankroll value short of infinity.  The house always wins with this strategy.

There's three levels of laws about refunds.  There are federal consumer protection laws, generally pretty anemic.

Most of the effective laws are state laws.  All states have laws based on the Uniform Commercial Code.  Many states, though, have their own consumer protection and anti-fraud laws.  In some of these states, you can collect double or triple damages from fraudulent practices.

To the extent BFL has marketed their products to these states, they are probably subject to long-arm jurisdiction and can be sued in that state by anyone with the gumption to walk into their nearest county courthouse.

E.g., are you in New Jersey?  Are you being refused a refund?  Google New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act.  See that phrase "treble damages" showing up in the results?  That's lawyerspeak for triple.  You can fuck their shit up.

Thailand may have draconian defamation laws, but except for the criminal part (which is rarely if ever applied between private parties), they are barely worse than those in the UK.  Even in the United States, with our vaunted First Amendment, you can be dragged through court on a bullshit libel case for months or years (though with good legal representation you stand a much better chance of it just being thrown out of court without a trial and getting your attorney fees paid by the other side).

I seriously doubt the Bank of Thailand is getting into an argument about what it did or didn't say.  It is the central bank of Thailand, which makes its President or Chairman or whatever the equivalent of Ben Bernanke in the U.S.  This actually does make what the bank says some form of "the law" in Thailand.  It doesn't make him some kind of king who can just spout off jackass pronouncements that contradict existing statutory law.

The Bank of Thailand has a website, and there is nothing on it about Bitcoin.  If it has promulgated regulations about Bitcoin, I can't find them.  But they probably don't just translate the possibly tens of thousands of pages of regulations they have into English and publish them the instant they make them.

I would assume (basing this assumption on the idea that a central bank in Thailand acts like one in other countries) that before actually issuing regulations, there is a public comment period of some kind where the regulations are proposed, there are then hearings, which usually involve interested parties such as actual bankers or other business people in the regulated industry, there is at least some pretense of considering these opinions, then the regulation is promulgated and becomes effective.  The central bank issues documents saying what the regulation is, the actual regulations (often incomprehensible gobbledygook to anyone other than a lawyer), an executive summary purporting to explain the regulations in simple terms, stuff like this.

Where is this stuff?  

While I can understand a business being very concerned about even an informal statement by something like the central bank of the country where they're operating, hey, if Ben Bernanke said Bitcoin was illegal tomorrow I might not get rid of my BTC but I'd certainly shit myself and turn pale, when a central bank actually takes an official position, there's PAPER about it.

Even in the U.S., FinCEN has said some somewhat disturbing things about their view of Bitcoin, but what they've said on paper has been fairly reasonable.

Where's the paper on all this bullshit?  If it's in Thai, someone needs to find it and translate it.  

Whether OP or Goat, or another person, someone needs to do this, because the bullshit is starting to stink.

No.  And a professional gambler who is actually a professional does not do this.  He depends on his livelihood for a very lengthy series of rolls of the dice to tend toward average as the convergence of random variables basically breaks even.


Of course, you might have a resume so spotty that being a professional gambler is actually much better as an explanation for holes in your resume than even worse reasons you didn't have a job.

Beats prison, I suppose.

Just did another buy for a $195 MoneyPak.  Immediate success.  Site is operating smoothly and reliably.

It's possible OP doesn't even have a lawyer and is a troll himself.  I'd like to see his response, though.

There is no such law.  It is a common saying, generally directed at Communist countries.  The general form of the "truism" is that in "good" countries, like America, everything is permissible unless prohibited, but in "bad" countries, like Communist China, everything is prohibited unless permissible.  

It is basically a stereotype, not a legal principle.

BFL has lawyers?  Are these the same ones who set up their corporation?  <--- trick question!

I think the only lawyer any principals of BFL need is a good criminal defense lawyer, emphasis on the "criminal" part.

Better Call Saul!

Well, the fact that OP said this and apparently shut down a business based on it is evidence.  It's just not very good evidence when nobody else seems to be verifying the claim.

What they should have learned from that is that government currency manipulation can lead to disaster.  After all, the reason it was shorted was that it was entirely predictable the price would crash, yet the government insisted on artificially fixing the exchange rate to a price of their choosing in relation to USD.  The rest of Southeast Asia's economies went down like dominos and with them, the Asian economy in general and a good chunk of the entire world's economy.

Now, even if the OP has exaggerated, if he is at least telling the substantive truth about what the bankers are saying, they are creating yet another mess just by expressing unfounded opinions recklessly.  (OP may be guilty of that bad habit himself.)

Looks like an attempt at a one man sting operation to me.  Not that there's anything wrong with that per se but it doesn't make for a very sympathetic plaintiff if it comes down to that.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply that I actually agreed with their interpretation.  It still makes it difficult to operate an exchange if you can't get a bank to do transfers for you, though.  In any event, the title of the thread is overblown and perhaps entirely inaccurate.

The bankers in Thailand are basically the very same idiots who tanked the entire Asian economy in 1997 by being too stupid to understand how currency works.  While this is disappointing, it really shouldn't be surprising.