Quote from: cypherdoc on May 18, 2015, 10:19:56 PM

Quote from: smooth on May 18, 2015, 10:02:33 PM

Quote from: rocks on May 18, 2015, 09:55:03 PM

Am debating what are the innate properties that constitute money. For the reasons stated in prior posts I do not consider privacy to be applicable to what makes good or bad money and do not see that as a factor towards driving adoption.

Privacy is not necessarily a property of money. Fungibility is a property of money though, and without strong legal guarantees of fungibility, it likely does require privacy because if you can trace "bad" or "good" coins then fungibility isn't there. Bitcoin currently doesn't have whitelisting/blacklisting, etc. (for the most part; there do seem to be some exceptions involving Coinbase, etc.) but as long as that concept is in play fungibility is a question.

i think privacy is an important aspect of money.

at least if you want it to be adopted by the broadest swaths of the population which you should. and that even means adoption by druglords and money launderers who absolutely need their privacy. not that i advocate those sorts of activities but that's unrelated to my point.

i also don't think Coinbase is a privacy destroyer except if you try to do something illegal with coins one hop away from them. as the coins spread out through the economy though it's extremely difficult to link illegal activity with those original coins.

Not questioning whether privacy is an important aspect to have in money, it definitely is.

But I think everyone needs to work out for themselves if privacy is: 1) an innate property of money, or if privacy is 2) derived from how money is used. I personally think it is #2. This has very important implications on if you think Bitcoin will win, or if something like Monero will win. If you think #1 then Monero is better money, if #2 then Bitcoin at this point.

Gold was fungible & portable, it was the combination of these two properties that enabled Gold to be used privately. When governments outlawed gold, both portability and acceptance dropped significantly which made gold much more difficult to be used privately. This leads me to believe #2 above.