Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Eventually the FUNGIBILITY issue of bitcoin will make headlines ...
by
iCEBREAKER
on 30/09/2015, 21:24:20 UTC
Do you understand then how subjective your definition of fungibility is?

Hey I'm just using the dictionary man

Quote
From your POV any medium of exchange that is suspect to traceability by any means is non fungible.

That is not what I said.

What I said is the intrinsic properties make something inherently fungible only when there is no useful traceability (or other physical distinguishability). Otherwise if individual units can be distinguished and then it is up to people, not technology or science, to decide whether it is fungible in practice or not. The obvious example here is paper money. Not only is it fungible by law (we'll ignore that here) but it is fungible only because people don't for the most part ever pay any attention to the serial numbers. If people started doing so, fungibility could only be restored by creating money (such as metal coins) without serial numbers.

Obviously intrinsic indistinguishability properties provide stronger fungibility than people do, and because the Bitcoin ledger doesn't have those properties, this thread exists.

For the all-important at-hand task of enabling defections, I believe smooth's practical definition (with its messy privacy overlap/conflation) is of more use than brg444's academic, Platonic construal of the term.

Simply substituting a non-controversial equivalent for the disputed jargon serves to clarify the point:

Quote
Obviously intrinsic indistinguishability properties provide stronger fungibility interchangeability than people do, and because the Bitcoin ledger doesn't have those properties, this thread exists.