Coin taint and blacklisting are what break Bitcoin’s fungibility.
BTC is an NFT: A
non-fungible token, due to coin taint and blacklisting. The subset of Bitcoiners who refuse to acknowledge this are either living in a Reality Distortion Field, or still under the influence of the blockchain transparency fetishization with which Mike Hearn,
et al. poisoned Bitcoin early on. I identify a lack of fungibility as the biggest long-term economic threat to Bitcoin.
Fungibility is both necessary and sufficient for privacy—and
vice versa. Attaining one gives the other; neither can be attained without the other. Some people get this;
e.g., in a post from 2013 titled,
“Re: Coin Validation misunderstands fungibility and could destroy bitcoin”:Now in an ideal world how it is supposed to work is the fungibility/anonymity is secure like zerocoin.
Dr. Back,
an authentic Cypherpunk, has also
given speeches on why fungibility needs to be assured cryptographically.
* (
Transcript of Adam Back on fungibility and privacy.)
Maths, not law. When coins are anonymous and indistinguishable, then Bitcoin is no longer an NFT.
(* Notable: Under the heading, “Fungibility? Why would I care?”, ChipMixer’s FAQ quotes from and links to the above-linked transcript. Their understanding of these issues speaks well of them.)Wasabi has embraced coin taint and coin blacklisting based on anti-privacy surveillance: The exact things which destroy BTC fungibility, which thus threaten Bitcoin’s long-term economic viability. And now, nopara73 claims that Wasabi restores Bitcoin’s fungibility? That is so audacious a lie, I am mulling whether it’s time to start with the scam tags.
Wasabi also uses inferior technology. CoinJoin was clever when it was invented; but CJ and any type of coin-mixing scheme have since been made obsolete by advances in the field of cryptography. I wish not hereby to diverge into a tangent about that; I am intending to raise it elsewhere, as I prepare for my own campaign to get Bitcoin some fungibility. Suffice it must for now benevolently to scare BTC holders where it hurts:
Vitalik understands fungibility. While you all aren’t looking, while you are playing nonsense games with coin-mixing schemes, Ethereum has more or less quietly been building up the infrastructure for optimal fungibility (= privacy). And so has Solana—a prospect which should properly frighten both BTC holders and ETH holders!
Wasabi’s attempt to abuse the fungibility issue for their marketing of a coin-taint service is a bald-faced swindle.
Anyhow: Does someone understand how making a privacy tool more intuitive to use, increases fungibility?
Privacy = fungibility. Fungibility = privacy. See above. Dr. Back explained it well in his 2014 talk on the subject.
I repeat: the issue with fungibility is that some exchanges and other services act as if Bitcoin wasn't fungible.
The reality is that Bitcoin
isn’t fungible. It is not fungible, because exchanges and other services (including Wasabi!)
can do this. Although I applaud your efforts to encourage a boycott of these anti-fungibility exchanges and services, ultimately, the only way to stop them is to assure that they
cannot do what they are doing.
PSA: 'Taint' is basically the opposite of 'fungibility'. Saying that one coin is not like another is what we consider calling it 'tainted', and 'non-fungible'.
Strongly agreed. But the problem cannot be fixed, if people
can say that one coin is not like another.
Cypherpunks write code. Trust the maths. Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent. Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking: You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.
A man resorts to dialectics only when he has no other means to hand.... It can be only the last defence of those who have no other weapons.