I've seen several posts lately from people willing to treat Bitcoin as non-fungible because they believe some coins are "tainted".
I'd say this is a severe threat to Bitcoin, and I wouldn't be surprised if governments use this because they can't stop Bitcoin in any other way. If people believe Bitcoin is "tainted", they won't accept it anymore. "We" should really inform people not to fall for this.
Nobody would reject a dollar bill because it has previously been used in a crime, despite the fact that
85 to 90% contains traces of cocaine. Claiming Bitcoin isn't fungible is just plain stupid.
This site explains very well what it's all about:
Coin validation proposed to offer as a service to trace coins and try to give you a rating about how the history of the coin from your point of view and to offer that as a service to businesses. I think this could be quite dangerous because it goes back to that 17th century court case where now you could receive a coin that is perfectly valid at the time that you receive it, but a few weeks later a crime is uncovered and now your coin is tainted. So if this coin validation service is advicing many of the merchants where you would want to spend your coin at, it's tainted and now the merchant would refuse to accept your coin. That's a strange experience for you; you're holding a coin that you might have to sell at a discount to get rid of it. The aggregate effect of this might create a run on the bitcoin price. So it reopens this long-set legal principle that currency or currency units are all equal.
I can't stress enough how important this is!
Thanks for the quotes Loyce! Informing people is exactly what this thread is aimed at; though admittedly mostly focusing on keeping a list of the
.