THAILAND’S SUPREME COURT SAYS BITCOIN HAS A FORM ON THE NETWORK — SO TAKING IT BY FORCE IS ROBBERY — THE CASH FALLBACK IS 1,878,000 BAHT, THE 2022 VALUE
On September 15, 2022, five men cornered a foreign tourist and his wife in a cafe on Koh Samui, punched him, grabbed his phone and made him turn $50,000 into 2.480801 bitcoin and send it to a wallet one of them held. That account comes from Siam Blockchain’s October 28, 2026 summary of the judgment, which it sourced to the Thai Supreme Court’s case database. The defendant, named only as Mr. A, had booked the ferry tickets out. The Koh Samui court gave him 15 years, cut by a third to 10, and ordered him to hand back the bitcoin or pay 1,878,000 baht.
His appeal was one legal point: the bitcoin he helped take had no value of its own, so nothing belonging to another person was taken. The full bench of the Supreme Court said no in judgment 4929/2569. Thai civil law has two words here. Section 137 calls a thing an object with a form. Section 138 widens property to formless objects that have a price and can be held. The court did not settle for the wider word. Per Siam Blockchain, it described bitcoin as a unit of data that has a form on the network, has a price and can be held. Thaiger’s account has the court refusing to treat it as something without value or without form.
Look at how the court found the value: a Bank of Thailand letter saying crypto is not legal tender but does trade, and price sites like CoinMarketCap. Fine. The part that matters to anyone holding their own keys is the fact pattern. The gang did not need a bank, a password reset or a judge. They needed the man’s phone in his hand for a few minutes. A key you carry is a thing you can be beaten for, and Thailand’s top court now treats the coins it moves like any other thing taken by force.
The court can order the coins back. It cannot move them; only whoever holds the key to that wallet can. The fallback is 1,878,000 baht, the value fixed in September 2022, when $50,000 bought coins at about $20,155 each. If the coins never come back, the victim is paid in 2022 money for them. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $80,066.