With your Thailand example, the author made the point that it's actually cheaper through P2P model (like Hawala) without the need to eat the exchange spread/fees by changing BTC.
And yeah, fraud is still a huge problem for e-commerce, but how does Bitcoin solve that? As stated in the article, it just pushes more responsibility to the user. Multi-sig doesn't solve that either, you still need a 3rd party escrow provider, who will charge a fee.