Quote from: Best_Change on June 24, 2022, 04:35:38 AM

Quote from: death_wish on June 20, 2022, 06:01:31 AM

Witty. The “NF” in “NFT” stands for Non-Fungible, so you clearly are not so thoughtless about this as some people.

Regardless, everyone needs to be informed that the absurd notion of so-called “taint” is an existential threat to Bitcoin.

It literally means that 1 BTC ≠ 1 BTC.

Best_Change, I am not inclined to open a debate about this in your thread. I’m not here to start an argument with you. I hereby express no opinion either way about your service in itself, which I have not evaluated.

I speak out because the “coin taint” delusion is a cancer which continues to grow, as long as people give no pushback. People need to boycott services that peddle the “coin taint” lie; such services are untrustworthy and destructive to Bitcoin. People need to speak out, as I am doing here. “Coin taint” is only taking hold because its perpetrators are skilled propagandists, who make an obscene pretense of having some sort of moral high ground. The “tainting” of coins is wrong—it is outrageous—someone needs to call out the Emperor‘s New Clothes here.

Please understand that AML does not threaten the integrity of the bitcoin ecosystem as such,

Unfortunately, it does threaten the integrity of Bitcoin. Lack of fungibility is corrosive to confidence in a currency. If some units of currency have “taint”, others don’t, and the only way to tell the difference is to pay for the “analysis” of corrupt private companies that are essentially enemies of Bitcoin, then the currency just is not very useful as money. In the long term, this is one of the biggest existential threats to Bitcoin’s value—even to its basic viability.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is a good explainer of fungibility from a February 9, 2014 talk by Dr. Adam Back, the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream:

https://youtu.be/3dAdI3Gzodo?t=47

Dr. Back later speaks of Bitcoin, then of “taint”:

https://youtu.be/3dAdI3Gzodo?t=1379

This video is old, and much of the technological information is outdated. But the basic issues remain the same.

I rarely cite a video, but this is a good one; and the link helps to avoid a lengthy tangential exposition in your thread. Here, I will simply conclude that “coin taint” is an illusion. If you believe that such a thing exists, then you have been bamboozled. Avoid services that pretend there is such a thing as a “tainted” bitcoin—and in the long term, please support any efforts to add to Bitcoin what Dr. Back says on one of his slides:

“Idealized cryptographic ecash aims to enforce fungibility via indistinguishability rather than law... trust in mathematics over law”.