@ dinofelis Citing a lot of anecdotal arguments to try to establish a principle is basically a self-fullfilling exercise. You're implicitly using a record-keeping archetype in your appraisals of what is a priority and what isn't, which will clearly always lead to the same conclusion. You need to first make an appraisal of the monetary archetype itself.

Think of it as a chain of trust. All forms of money - whether commodity, paper or credit, lie somewhere along a chain of trust where one "tier" is backed by another until you get down to some tangible form of value that is not a reference to something else.

Even fiat money is ultimately backed by future economic activity = think diggers, schools, roads and farms. Then the chain starts - bonds are issues backed by that activity, currency is printed backed by the bonds, credit is issued backed by the currency etc. Chain of trust. If you're choosing a monetary archetype for a new electronic token, the very first characteristic which informs the priorities given to the properties of that new money is where you're placing it in the chain of trust.

With that in mind, we can note that all the tiers in the "backed" columns basically share the same basic priorities. However the base tier exhibits exactly the opposite priorities. So when choosing an archetype for the new money, we cannot blur or combine the two into 1 because their monetary properties are in conflict in terms of priority:




In fact, thats a stretch of the concept of anonymity that has been pushed by promoters of opaque blockchains.

"Knowing" about a transaction doesn't change the intrinsic properties of a monetary medium. "Anonymous" = "A-nony-mous" means something is un-named. A lump of coal is anonymous by that definition. If it gets passed around 100 people and I'm the last one to hold it, then pass it to you. You know that I had it last because you have knowledge of the transaction. But it doesn't change the nature of the lump of coal as anonymous.

It's different from, say, money in a bank which cannot exist independently of the person who backs the credit it represents. That is not anonymous money. Again, it's a question of relevancy and priority. You can see me get out of my car, so that makes my ownership of the car "less private" than it would have been. So what ? You saw me pass you the lump of coal and may even have knowledge of a previous owner. So what ?

It isn't a reason to hide the car or disguise the coal. Recourse to mitigating transparency is not an option if we want to maximise value - the archetypal analysis tells us that.

The answer therefore is to decouple the problems of fungibility and transparency so they can be independently optimised - not at the expense of each other.