Quote from: n0nce on Today at 01:32:06 AM

In fiat world, people accept bank notes without checking their history through its serial number and they aren't checking them for the anecdotal traces of cocaine (could also check for blood, etc.) - every fiat bank note is not the same, but is universally treated as such, around the world. Whenever they aren't, people get very upset, too, however not so in Bitcoin. I don't really understand why.

I think it’s for two reasons:

1. Legal tender laws make this easy, you have a right to have your bills accepted atleast at some point. But even fiat bills are not perfectly fungible despite being legal tender, higher bills don’t get accepted everywhere and cash can get refused by businesses, if there’s proper warnings in place beforehand(also depending one where you live). But when cash is not accepted at all, it’s a lot of people that experience this directly at the same time. Their funds are all blocked at the same time. So there will be more outcry and it can hurt business.

Coin taint and blacklisting are sneakier and psychologically more tricky. Not all users funds will be blocked/ frozen/ stolen at the same time. Most people that didn’t experience it directly won’t care enough or don’t even know it’s happening. They will maybe even buy into the bs reasoning for it, because their weren’t victims of it yet and maybe really believe that this is done for legitimate reasons and to solve a problem. Even tho it’s complete nonsense.

2. Cash has been around for a long time now and it’s acceptability is already widespread. Bitcoin is relatively new, as acceptability and usage grows i also would expect more people to react in similar ways to when it would happen to cash, but it’s still trickier when only a certain % of coins aren’t accepted. Similarly, i never saw an outcry when 500€ bills weren’t accepted somewhere, they only make a tiny percentage of bills in circulation and it didn’t affect enough users directly for people to care.

It would definitely help if Bitcoin can’t be told apart, I’ll definitely look into the possibilities more and study. Cash can simply cheat trough legal tender and always force universal acceptance of bills, if it wants to. Or reduce fungibility if the government wanted to. Code might be the only way to achieve true fungibility, but social acceptance will always play a role regardless. It might be worth trying to advance in both battles at the same time.