Quote from: americanpegasus on September 21, 2015, 03:42:31 PM

Not at all. I don't think you fully understand money. Subjective perception of value is all there is. Money only exists in the mind of those who value it. If people don't believe that two satoshis are equal, then they are not equal.

Bitcoin does make a distinction between them by way of a public and browsable blockchain that shows you the history of any bitcoin since inception.

One bitcoin does not equal one bitcoin.

http://sabr.io/

Blockchain analysis is already pretty good and only going to get better. A plea to the ignorance of the users is not a good argument.

The final nail in the coffin of bitcoin's fungibility *is* Satoshi's coins. If all bitcoins were equal and fungible, then it shouldn't matter that Satoshi began spending his coins. Upon receiving one you shouldn't panic that bitcoin users might start losing faith. But when dealing with *collectibles* (which bitcoin is) then that becomes an issue.

If you like fine art, and suddenly lots of famous paintings start winding up on your doorstep, you would reasonably assume that the popularity and faith in fine art is plummeting.

In Monero we don't have a Satoshi. Every user is free to transact, hold, and spend however they choose. The currency exists independent from the history of each unit. Gold and the dollar can be traced (with great effort as well) but they still pass the test for fungibility because without expending a massive amount of resources you can't effectively trace their history (especially with gold). With bitcoin tracing the history of a unit is trivial, and with Monero it's impossible.

You've basically strengthened my point:

Monero isn't just true digital gold. It's the equivalent of if gold automatically (and magically) went to a smelting facility every time it was spent and was melted down and mixed with other gold before coming back to the new owner.

It's the best form of money that civilization has ever seen.

I'm sorry but it is increasingly apparent to me that you are making a tragic mistake of conflating very different economic concepts.

For one, individual perception of value is quite different from the market's perception of value.

Bitcoin's traceability might make it interesting for someone with a collector's mindset but it has no impact on its fungibility.

It would be one thing for the market to disagree on the value of individual satoshis but this is absolutely impossible as they are totally undistinguishable from one another. Let me use two different examples to show why your analysis fail:

- Certain gold artifacts are valued at way more important prices then the actual market worth of their weight in gold. Does that make gold a "collectible"?

- A lot of people enjoy collecting notes and coins from certain years. A bundle of cash stolen from a bank might be identified and refused in certain circumstances because of its serial number. Does that make cash a "collectible"?

These two examples, I believe, demonstrate that what you refer to as an absence of fungibility is simply a consequence of individual or authorities attaching subjective value to an item because of its history but this is not an indictment on the monetary system itself!

Imagine one individual in possession of one of these gold artifacts or a special 20$ note attempts, for some unknown reason, to either trade his gold item to a pawnshop or deposit the 20$ at the bank.

What do you guess happens? If we assume the guy running the pawnshop doesn't know or care about the "symbolic" value of the item and is only concerned with its weight in gold no amount of history is going to bring him to buy said item for more than its market worth. Same for his "special bill", the cashier at the bank could not careless if it was used by Al Capone to do lines of cocaine, to her it's worth 20$ and no more.

The same logic applies for Bitcoin. If I am in possession of one of Mt. Gox's stolen coin and send it to Bitstamp, the market is not going to offer me a premium or refuse to buy it. Sure some nerds might cry foul and alert the exchange. In that case I could still head to fucking China and sell the same coin for market price on whatever their equivalent of localbitcoin is and no one will ask me any question.

I am curious why you did not address my thought experiment about the tainted coins but allow me to reiterate using your Satoshi scenario as I am confident it supports my position that no distinction can be made between two satoshis.

Let's pretend I have one of Satoshi's wallet address and decide to send him a bitcoin. How can you tell which one is mine from his stash?

In fact I do believe there is quite a lot of people that have sent him dust or coins over the years. If somehow he decides to move this lot of coins to an exchange are people somehow going to make a distinction between his original coins and whatever amount that was sent to him by these clowns? Of course no because they can't!

This effectively demonstrates that your logic does not hold. The market could careless whatever coin Satoshi decides to move, it is not the coins that matter because THEY ARE INDEED FUNGIBLE. It is their owner's decision that has a psychological impact on the market because they can identify ownership through the public ledger. Let's say we pretend that somehow someone is able to tie Satoshi's identity to a wallet/coins from...2013. Surely you would agree that the psychological impact on the market would be the same whether he decides to move these coins to BitStamp or the "original" ones.

Your "famous painting" example is downright stupid. If these would end up on my doorstep tomorrow one could only wonder who the fuck was stupid enough to pull off such a move and collectors all over the world will be willing to purchase them back at auction. That is because art pieces are truly a collector's item. Every paintings are unique, not "mutually interchangeable" and cannot be replaced by even an identical copy.

All of this is to say you are confusing privacy and traceability and somehow making this aspect of Bitcoin an indictment on its fungibility. Again, this is a mistake. What Monero offers is a baked-in solution for obfuscating the origins of every coin. Nothing more.

Now you're betting the house that technology isn't going to allow practical and seamless ways to do the same using Bitcoin. I would personally wager to say the odds are against you.