Re: Eventually the FUNGIBILITY issue of bitcoin will make headlines ...
Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.
wow really? lol
Yes, I addressed it in another thread, here's the slightly modified version:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perfectly fungible is what you said. Your bolded example above proves my point that bitcoin is not perfectly fungible as in your example an exchange/site can refuse to exchange or accept a particular set of coins coming from certain addresses.
Just because you say something, doesn't make it true.
The mere fact that you know stolen coins came from an address to another address...removes the fungibility portion. Who cares which coin was exactly the coin that was part of a scam? The point is that some of them (or all of them) are linked to a known crime/theft/scam.
NOT KNOWING which exact coin is related to a scam/crime/theft is not the way I would define bitcoin being "PERFECTLY FUNGIBLE".
I think you have your concepts/terminology mixed up.
I think not. What you are observing is a result of Bitcoin's traceability.
If I can obfuscate the provenance of what you call a "tainted" coin by use of crypto and other technologies then no one will refuse it.
It seems to me you are the one confusing terminologies. Bitcoin does not discriminate one coin from another. Within the system they are perfectly fungible. Only human preferences and personal subjective value could lead one coin to be refused.
http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/
imbécilités
Bitcoin uses no such things as blacklists nor does it taint coins. If such a list exist it is maintained by fiat interests and the rational thing to do is to avoid doing business with such entities.
If you participate into a transactions under such "rules" it is your voluntary choice as this is not how Bitcoin is ought to be used. Being that it is a peer-to-peer currency the only occasion where you should encounter such problem is when dealing with exchanges & USGians "bitcoin wallet services".
What you are looking at is an history of outputs. Each units within the system is indistinguishable.
And btw I don't have to go to china I can do it in my backyard.