How to Buy Bitcoin in Thailand as a Foreigner

[00:00:00] Are you a foreigner in Thailand trying to figure out how to buy Bitcoin? Maybe you’ve tried to buy from an exchange that you were previously using in your home country, but you got stuck because they wouldn’t accept Thai Baht deposits. Or maybe you’ve never bought Bitcoin before and you’re just trying to figure out where to start.

[00:00:15] In this video, I’ll show you the complete process of how to buy Bitcoin with Thai Baht in Thailand, from account set up to withdrawing your Bitcoin into your own wallet.

[00:00:23] Alright, let’s get started.

[00:00:25] Before we begin, I need to make something clear. This video is for educational purposes only. I do not provide financial advice, so please pause and read the full disclaimer before continuing.

[00:00:34] I’ll be doing this tutorial using the Thai exchange called Orbix. This video is not sponsored by Orbix, but after trying several Thai exchanges over the years, Orbix is my preferred option in Thailand, so it might be a good option for you as well. And if you use a different Thai exchange, the process will likely be quite similar.

[00:00:52] On Orbix you’re just gonna click the register button at the top of the page.

[00:00:56] Now to register, you’re just gonna enter an email address and password and confirm your password. This is the easy part. Now, once you have this done, you’re gonna be directed to completing A KYC process. This is known as know your Customer. So all Thailand crypto exchanges require you to go through this process in order to prevent fraud. And as foreigners, you’re gonna need to provide a passport and some other information to prove your identity and location.

[00:01:23] In my case, I eventually did have to go into the Orbix office to complete a short form in person. It only took a few minutes, but it is worth noting in case you have to go through that same process. Just remember that the KYC process is the most difficult part, but you only have to do it once.

[00:01:39] So once this is done, you’ll have it behind you and it’ll be super smooth after that.

[00:01:44] Once your Orbix account is verified, you will need to log in and then. You’re gonna click on the wallet area and into a section called deposits, and this is where you’re gonna deposit your Thai Baht. Now, I’ve always used the instant payment method because my bank account is connected to Orbix and remember to prevent any money laundering, they’re making sure that the deposit account you have linked to your account are gonna match your name perfectly. So it should match your passport or your id. But once that whole process was done, it’s actually really easy to add money into your account. So in my case, I’m gonna click the dropdown and click on an instant fiat transfer. Make sure you’re clicking on the fiat portion ’cause the coins will be, if you were to go going to deposit some Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency into the account. In our case, we need to fund our account with fiat currency, which is going to be Thai Baht. So I’m gonna go ahead and enter 10,000 Thai Baht here, and once I click submit, I am gonna have this QR code and I can scan it on my phone and deposit the money from my bank account right away. A lot of the mobile apps will allow a very seamless money transfer. So right now when I scanned it, my. Mobile app on my bank. My bank mobile app stated that it, it’s requesting 10,000 Thai Baht, which matches what I had entered in.

[00:03:14] I’m gonna go ahead and accept and confirm this transfer on my phone and within a few seconds. There you go. It was about one second. The deposit has successfully gone through.

[00:03:27] Next, we’re gonna scroll up and click on market at the top of the page, and this will lead us to the different cryptocurrencies and, uh, stable coins. So I’m gonna go ahead and click on Bitcoin here. And this is the market for buying and selling Bitcoin. Now, this will seem confusing at first, but don’t let it overwhelm you.

[00:03:54] The key to note here is that. This is all these orders of individuals that are both buying and selling Bitcoin, and what you’ll see is the price of Bitcoin in Thai Baht. So at the time of this recording, one Bitcoin is costing around 3,180,000 Thai Baht, but that’s not one price because you have a lot of different individuals that are both buying and selling.

[00:04:19] And so if I look here, what I can see is the prices on this left side. If I move upward, the price gets higher, and if I move downward, the price gets lower. And these at the top are all individuals who are. Selling. And these individuals at the bottom are people who are buying. So obviously if you’re buying, you want the lower price, and if you’re selling, you want the higher price.

[00:04:41] So right here, where they meet is where an individual could submit an order and expect that they could either get a buyer or a seller at that exact price. Now, in my case, what I’m gonna do is I wanna get. An order go to go through as quickly as possible. And so my way to do this is going to be to first pick the price.

[00:05:02] So I’m hovering over this buy Bitcoin area, and I’m gonna click on the price and I’m going to click the best price that I can get where there’s an order. That’s at least as large as the order that I want to make. So I can see here that there’s someone that is selling at the price of 3 million per Bitcoin and they’re selling 0.1 Bitcoin.

[00:05:21] Uh, and it’s gonna change constantly. You can see how it’s just changed back and forth, but you can see that there’s a lot of liquidity here. There’s a lot of individual, there’s an individual that’s selling. More than I even want to buy. So I’m gonna click on this ’cause I’m fine with that price. And then what I’m gonna do is click on how much I want to buy at that price.

[00:05:38] And in my case, I have 10,000 bought in my wallet. So I’m gonna click, I want a hundred percent of that. And now what we see is if I am able to buy at that price and I am spending a hundred percent of my, uh, 10,000 Thai Baht, then the actual amount I’m gonna get is 9,981 Baht. So it’s not gonna be perfect because there’s sort of a rounding process here.

[00:05:59] But in any case, let’s see if this order goes through if I click buy.

[00:06:02] So let’s go ahead and click this again. Say that I want a hundred percent of it and click buy Bitcoin. And now I’m gonna have to enter my password and we’re gonna go through. So let me go ahead and scroll down. Now, as you can see in the open orders right here, there are no open orders.

[00:06:18] And the reason why is because that Bitcoin that I bought, it went through right away. As I said, someone was selling at that price. If I clicked the buy, they sold it to me right away, so it went through. If it hadn’t gone through, then my order would stay in the open orders section until someone did end up selling it at that price.

[00:06:36] Or if they never did because the price continued to go up, then I might need to cancel that order. But as you can see, for now, what I’ve already done is I’ve made my purchase and it went through right away.

[00:06:47] If I go over into my order history, I’ll actually see the order that I just went through, and it will show me the price that I paid, the amount that I received, And the average price that I paid, so in the case that maybe my purchase was spread amongst different sellers, then the price that I paid might actually differ from my average price paid. But the idea is that I can see here how many Thai Baht I spent and how much Bitcoin I got in return.

[00:07:14] But the next step is going to be to actually withdraw this Bitcoin. ’cause you don’t really wanna keep a lot of Bitcoin on an exchange, even if it’s a trustworthy exchange, because you never know what’s gonna happen. So you can see that once I click on my wallet, then I can actually view the balance of my wallet and I can click on this withdraw button and make a withdraw.

[00:07:37] And I’ll be directed here to withdraw my coin so I can select the coin that I wanna withdraw. In my case, it’s gonna be Bitcoin and I can select the network I’m going to use to make this withdraw. So it’s actually sending a transaction on a blockchain. And so I’m gonna click to withdraw using the bitcoin.

[00:07:54] Blockchain and then I’m gonna enter in the address that I wanna send that Bitcoin to. I also tend to use the max withdraw, so it’ll tell me exactly how much I can withdraw from my wallet, how much I have, It will also show the transaction fee, and this transaction fee is 0.00025 Bitcoin. This is the fee that I’m charged by Orbix and by the blockchain altogether in order to get my Bitcoin out and if I wanna do a conversion right now.

[00:08:27] KU coin actually does have a easy calculator here I went to, and you can see that it’s about 789 Baht for this withdraw. So just know that every time you withdraw, you are gonna be hit with this fee. And while it would be cheaper on some other exchanges, it still is pretty substantial in this case. So that’s why I don’t always withdraw every transaction that I make.

[00:08:49] If I was going to make a deposit for. 500 Bitcoin every month. I might not withdraw that every single month. I’d wait until my actual amount of coins in my wallet was large enough that I was worried about keeping it on the exchange. And what that amount is will depend on you and your risk tolerance. But I usually wait until some amount has accumulated in my wallet, and then I’m gonna go ahead and do one batch withdraw and send it to my own personal wallet.

[00:09:22] If you don’t already have a Bitcoin wallet, one I could recommend is Muun This is a very easy to use wallet. It would be the best, in my opinion, for beginners because of its user experience, and it’s just super, super straightforward and also it’s easy to back up. So there are a couple methods for storing it just in case you lose your phone.

[00:09:42] It’s just gonna protect you there. Blue Wallet is another great one. It’s a bit more advanced, very powerful. I use it a lot as well as Nunchuck. Another powerful one. My personal preference is Nunchuck, but again, as a beginner, I would say Muun is a good starter option. I. Alternatively, if you do have quite a bit of Bitcoin and you’re buying quite a bit each month, then you may consider a hardware wallet, which is really just a way to store your Bitcoin offline in a way that it’s much more secure, and so another starter option for a hardware option is going to be Bitkey And this, as you can see, it kinda looks almost like a rock. It has a fingerprint sensor on it, and then it is tied to the application on your phone. But if you actually wanna send money, you can’t just open up the application on your phone. You’d also need to tap it to that hardware device. Another alternative is Coldcard from Coinkite and they have a few options.

[00:10:39] The Coldcard MK4 the Coldcard Q. These are very, very powerful. They can do a lot of stuff. If you wanna grow into it and learn more about Bitcoin over time, then this would be a good thing to try out as well. I hope you got value from this video. If you did, please click the like button. If you’re interested in more videos about living and working in Thailand, subscribe to the channel. It helps me a ton, but more importantly, I promise I’ll do my best to provide you with useful content every week. Alright, I’ll catch you on the next one.