Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
rocks
on 18/05/2015, 23:20:20 UTC
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.

Fully agree. But as HeliKopterBen and dEBRUYNE pointed out a few posts ago, a fully private currency such as Monero could just as easily be outlawed in it's entirety. Which puts Monero in the same position as a Bitcoin where blacklist coins are outlawed.

Legally yes, but in terms of fungibility no. If I'm a fully compliant Bitcoin user I may -- purely as a practical matter -- have to check on coins I'm receiving to see if they are "bad", and because coins may be added to a blacklist (or removed from a whitelist) after I receive them, it means I'm left with performing my own KYC to convince myself that the counterparty is unlikely to be passing off "bad" coins.

I'm not doing this because the law requires it but because I'm worried about being left holding the bag with "bad" coins, even if the transaction itself is entirely legal. This is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of fungibility (again, which is distinct from legality).

The risk of this is fungibility concerns is far less to nonexistent with a private coin, where tagging coins as "good" or "bad" is technologically less feasible or impossible (Monero is not as private as say zerocash, so some issues remain there, but far less so than Bitcoin).

The only reason you would ever be worried about receiving "bad" coins would be because of some legal framework that makes such coins possibility "bad". The exact same legal framework could make 100% of Monero's coins "bad". And you're back to square one.

No you're not because if all coins are bad then all coins have the same value. You can't overpay and be left holding the bag.

That is the definition of fungibility. Again, you are confusing privacy with fungibility. Without regard for the merits of either/both.

I don't think so, it seems to be that you've confused them. I think my prior posts (that weren't quoted) explained why. Fungibility is an innate property, privacy is a question of usage. You're free to disagree but I'll still think that these arguments that a coin needs privacy to be built in or off the mark.

Fungibility also doesn't mean how I think you are using it. Even in your black/white coin scenario, Bitcoin coins are still 100% fungible, the bitcoin network will treat 1 BTC as 1 unit and 0.5 BTC as half a unit in all cases (i.e. to the network 1 BTC blacklist = 1 BTC whitelist), that is perfect fungibility.

Things such as dimonds are not fungible, different people will value 2 different one caret diamonds differently. That is an example of something not fungible. Not black/white market coins where a government might try to force different values for them, but the network would treat them identically.