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).
Kudos smooth. A public blockchain is a new era. Without fungibility, then it the culpability falls onto the user of the money to research the entire trail of the coin. This was never a widespread property of money in the past, even though serial numbers do exist on cash now they aren't a very viable method to blacklist because they are spent decentralized. Centralization of the mining is the key aspect the government needs so it can enforce regulation. Without enforcement, laws are impotent. The government doesn't like to enforce impotent laws that people can't possibly not ignore (e.g. anti-jaywalking law for rural roads or outlaw spending of cash via physical serial numbers), because their impotence emboldens the people towards fighting for freedom. Government exists because people are confident that government has to power to enforce its edicts.
Add: people would never slow down to MANUALLY check serial numbers on cash against a government black or white list. I have observed how difficult it is to get people in a social network format to do any simple action consistently. People are really hard-headed.