Samourai Wallet has been taken down by the U.S. authorities: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/founders-and-ceo-cryptocurrency-mixing-service-arrested-and-charged-money-laundering. You can verify by opening samouraiwallet.com (it's under the authorities' control).

Another privacy enhancing tool goes down the road. Apparently, the governments use everything in their disposal to undermine the users' privacy. Samourai team had recently announced that they were developing a decentralized version of whirlpool, using the Soroban network. It could be the case that they foresaw their own disappearance.

Very frustrated. An important reminder and good quote is needed here.

R.I.P. Samourai.

You know that the network is clogged up when the shipping from Germany to Greece costs less than the Bitcoin median fee. 

So, let me get this straight:

• I trade mixed bitcoin: I'm bearing a risk.
• I trade (mixed) XMR: I'm not bearing a risk.

Completely reasonable.

No. Dumb people exist. That does not change the reality though. If you think it does, then neither Monero is fungible, because I can find an idiot who will buy my coinbase coins with a 50% premium.

It certainly has less traders than Binance, yes. That does not mean it's not an option. And Bisq was just an example. You can even use atomic swaps, or a host variety of other services to convert any bitcoin to either fiat or crypto.

If you don't believe me or don't get it... You know how it goes.

Say that I received 1 BTC from ISIS. I send this bitcoin to whirlpool. It's getting mixed 'til eternity. Please explain me the risk from selling coinjoined coins. I have no direct relation with ISIS from a blockchain perspective, and chain analysis will simply flag it as "taint" because of its inability to track it, just as with XMR.

I love how we transitioned from "certain coins can be traded for a 50% discount" to "b-b-but Bisq lacks liquidity". You know what it brings to mind? "Bitcoin holds no value because no vendors accept it".  

If there's insufficient liquidity, make an offer. As for eXch being centralized, yes, it can be shut down. But, is it currently treating all coins equally? Yes. Are there more swap services that stick to the same notion? Yes. As long as there's just one, Bitcoin is fungible.
 
"How many people out there use Bitcoin as currency, 1 to 100, 1 to 1.000, 1 to 10.000? It's not money!"  

As for Andreas, I don't completely agree with him on this matter. He once told its viewers to send coinjoined coins to themselves for k times so that "taint" can disappear and their centralized exchange accept their private coins, which is completely moronic, and due to the nature of "taint", is not guaranteed to work.

The max it can go is 4x at once.

• Total privacy wasn't the original plan.
• Just because the blockchain is transparent, it doesn't mean coins are non-fungible.

The fact that you can spend any coin at the exact same exchange rate as any other coin proves it is fungible. Literally, point me to any coin you want and I can point you to a place where you can spend it or trade it normally.

That's the definition of fungibility.

I found the bug in the bug:

'\' probably ignores the character next to it.

That might be a good reason to dump Binance.

No, it didn't. Just because there might be dumb people who want to trade their "tainted" coins at a 50% discount, doesn't make it the truth. These people can use decentralized solutions to trade them anonymously with no "discount" BS.

Except for me, and for every single person out there who's using decentralized exchanges, or exchanges which don't discriminate their traders based on inaccurate blockchain analysis.

For once more, that's a privacy problem, not a fungibility problem. The fact that I'd be directly tied with ISIS doesn't make the coins less valuable than the rest.

Is this puzzle really worth trying to solve? It's been close to a decade. Can someone give me a TL;DR?

Yep. No problem.

BTW, do you know your coins' history? You do know that ISIS coins might be sitting on your wallet right now, right?

It stops being peer-to-peer cash if you deposit it in a CEX. Their platform, their rules. If they discriminate based on inaccurate bullshit, then I'd never use them, especially for such large amount. If you want instant liquidation, then you'll probably have to weigh the tradeoffs.

What kind of question is that? Is it fungibility or morals the topic?

Yep.

I don't care what a group of businesses have decided to do. The fact is that decentralized solutions like Bisq, or even more centralized like HodlHodl, eXch and Robosats treat all coins equally. That's enough to rightly claim that every bitcoin is equally valuable.

Why does the history matter? We all receive cash that has been used to buy or sell cocaine, we know it. So what? For once more, coin history a privacy problem, not a fungibility.

You're missing the point. Sure, theoretically we can softfork and "fix the exploit" if there's enough demand. But, the Ordinal users can find another loophole to store their data, and it'll probably be worse for the rest of us. Imagine if Ordinal users bloated the UTXO set instead of using tapscript. That'd be a verification nightmare, and I'm sure they can handle it financially!

There. Is. No. Room. For. Censorship. The more you try to censor what you deem as "spam", the more you're pushing that spam to become indistinguishable from monetary transactions.

Question: what should we do if instead of Ordinal users there were "legitimate users" who used Bitcoin as cash? Censor a percentage of those, or work on scaling?

Once more, what we are presently experiencing is the inevitable outcome of Bitcoin's nature.

Interesting poll results. Apparently, more than a third of the people in this topic believe that Bitcoin is not fungible!

I don't agree on this definition. The way I understand it is: fungibility is when all coins are equally valuable. Take a bitcoin from Binance and another bitcoin from cocaine sellers. Both are equally valuable as far as I can tell. Both can be sold or used at an exchange rate of $66k, at the time of writing this.

According to your definition, nothing is truly fungible. Even XMR are not completely indistinguishable between one another. Gold coins are neither indistinguishable unless melt.

That's a good point actually. I never thought that electronic fiat is non-fungible.  

Being able to track the history is a privacy problem, not a fungibility problem.

Off-topic, but Monero is pretty neat currency, and used quite a lot as medium of exchange lately. (Not as Bitcoin, of course)

Absolutely disagree. Bitcoin doesn't censor for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do. If you don't like censorship-resistant always-no-matter-what cash, there's a host variety of cryptocurrencies I can direct you to.

- "I don't consider OP_RETURN spam to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider LN channels to be transactions (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".
- "I don't consider centralized exchanges' transactions to be peer-to-peer (going back to the P2P transfer of digital cash), so the same rules shouldn't apply".

Do you get it now?

According to you. According to someone else, they might pose a threat to the P2P cash model. According to me, no transaction that complies with the consensus rules is a threat.

That's only non-standard. It's perfectly valid to create dust. Be certain that if enough people were willing to trade millions of dollars for dust, the miners would bypass any standard rules. Especially if dust was standard beforehand, as already happens with Ordinals.

If you want the system to scale, work on scaling. Not on censorship. That's the appropriate response.

I want to get an answer to this question from the community of Bitcoin.

The opinions on fungibility go like this:

• No: Many places buy the "taint" nonsense and treat bitcoins unequally. Therefore, you might be discriminated based on your coins' history.
• Yes: No matter the history, 1 BTC = 1 BTC, always. The protocol doesn't treat them differently, and we shouldn't interact with businesses that enforce this "taint" notion, which is evidently based on inaccurate fallacies.

I'm personally on the latter group. Third parties can treat them however they like. They're just losing me as client. Decentralized solutions treat all coins equally, as they should.

In the Monero community, there is a prevailing perspective that due to these businesses, Bitcoin is not fungible, and Monero is. My question is: have you ever paid a business that buys the "taint" nonsense with Monero? Does it make any sense to enforce this BS while accepting a completely private currency that you cannot track? In my view, if a business performs blacklists on my bitcoins, it absolutely doesn't accept Monero. You either accept both Bitcoin and Monero as fungible, or you blacklist the former and delist the latter (due to your inability to track it).

Not gonna lie. That made me laugh!

Great, so here's a fact: we don't do that in here. We cannot afford censorship. If you start censoring this and that, you open the Pandora's box, and be sure you might be next in line to be censored.

Great. So, what do we do to centralized exchanges and their users? They don't use it as a peer-to-peer cash system; it's clearly against the concept. Or, what do we do to dust attacks? I can claim they are spam and everyone would agree. What about second layers that do not go according to the whitepaper? Let's ban them too, why not? What about OP_RETURN? Clearly not an addition related to financial transactions.

What makes you think that your opinion on spam is the holy grail of truth we should all follow, whereas my opinion on spam is just subjective and must be ignored?

Dumb people don't have infinite money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

These two particular rows drew my attention as well, but I didn't think of "bris" and "risk". At first, I thought that maybe "tool" is "&TT2" from &TT2&E. But, then the OP clarified that it is not a simple substitution ('&'='t', 'T'='o' etc.). Then, I was trying at different silver card placements, until I hit the 6th. Then, I started checking silver characters and where they point, and it was a matter of time until all words fit.

You lost me here. I did figure out that wE~T is seat, but I couldn't figure out what's 'L' and '1'. Why did you turn them into 'a' and 'b'?

• 'a' points to L, top right.
• 'b' points to '1' top left

How did you work out the "top right" and "top left"? We both didn't figure out how the OP decides the silver card placement in the beginning, as far as I can tell.

Very good opponent. See you at the next puzzle! <Evil laugh>

Jokes asides, you deserve it. I didn't write a program, you took it to the next level.

If you solve the next one, it's two life changes, so make sure to dedicate all your time.  

---

Edit: This is how far I reached:

Time: 11'

Username: BlackHatCoiner
BTC SegWit Address: bc1qe54w0rp9unm5da8h2axrehj3n3x6v5frvpaj9v