Do individuals have the freedom to refuse coins with taint that they do not like?
Politicians have certain restraints, and perhaps some religious people might not want to associate themselves with money from some sources?
The public block chain ledger offers new ways to organize this use of money that was previously not so possible to authoritatively accomplish. Is it a better money for this reason?
The reason is that coins are always blacklisted in retrospect. By the time the coins are blacklisted, taint will have already diffused across previously-white coins. If these coins are suddenly un-spendable, then the currency system is pretty useless.
exactly right.
also, think about the edge case where an attacker decides to send blacklisted coins to
every known address in the system. are all the UTXO's in those addresses now tainted? given my emphasis on UTXO's being the more valid way to conceptualize this topic, blacklisting
addresses doesn't even make sense.