Eventually the FUNGIBILITY issue of bitcoin will make headlines ...

[brg444]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

wow really? lol

Yes, I addressed it in another thread, here's the slightly modified version:

I'm sorry but it is increasingly apparent to me that you are making a tragic mistake of conflating very different economic concepts.

For one, individual perception of value is quite different from the market's perception of value.

Bitcoin's traceability might make it interesting for someone with a collector's mindset but it has no impact on its fungibility.

It would be one thing for the market to disagree on the value of individual satoshis but this is absolutely impossible as they are totally undistinguishable from one another. Let me use two different examples to show why your analysis fail:

- Certain gold artifacts are valued at way more important prices then the actual market worth of their weight in gold. Does that make gold a "collectible"?

- A lot of people enjoy collecting notes and coins from certain years. A bundle of cash stolen from a bank might be identified and refused in certain circumstances because of its serial number. Does that make cash a "collectible"?

These two examples, I believe, demonstrate that what you refer to as an absence of fungibility is simply a consequence of individual or authorities attaching subjective value to an item because of its history but this is not an indictment on the monetary system itself!

Imagine one individual in possession of one of these gold artifacts or a special 20$ note attempts, for some unknown reason, to either trade his gold item to a pawnshop or deposit the 20$ at the bank.

What do you guess happens? If we assume the guy running the pawnshop doesn't know or care about the "symbolic" value of the item and is only concerned with its weight in gold no amount of history is going to bring him to buy said item for more than its market worth. Same for his "special bill", the cashier at the bank could not careless if it was used by Al Capone to do lines of cocaine, to her it's worth 20$ and no more.

The same logic applies for Bitcoin. If I am in possession of one of Mt. Gox's stolen coin and send it to Bitstamp, the market is not going to offer me a premium or refuse to buy it. Sure some nerds might cry foul and alert the exchange. In that case I could still head to fucking China and sell the same coin for market price on whatever their equivalent of localbitcoin is and no one will ask me any question.

Let's pretend I have one of Satoshi's wallet address and decide to send him a bitcoin. How can you tell which one is mine from his stash?

In fact I do believe there is quite a lot of people that have sent him dust or coins over the years. If somehow he decides to move this lot of coins to an exchange are people somehow going to make a distinction between his original coins and whatever amount that was sent to him by these clowns? Of course no because they can't!

This effectively demonstrates that your logic does not hold. The market could careless whatever coin Satoshi decides to move, it is not the coins that matter because THEY ARE INDEED FUNGIBLE. It is their owner's decision that has a psychological impact on the market because they can identify ownership through the public ledger. Let's say we pretend that somehow someone is able to tie Satoshi's identity to a wallet/coins from...2013. Surely you would agree that the psychological impact on the market would be the same whether he decides to move these coins to BitStamp or the "original" ones.

All of this is to say you are confusing privacy and traceability and somehow making this aspect of Bitcoin an indictment on its fungibility. Again, this is a mistake.

Perfectly fungible is what you said. Your bolded example above proves my point that bitcoin is not perfectly fungible as in your example an exchange/site can refuse to exchange or accept a particular set of coins coming from certain addresses.


Just because you say something, doesn't make it true.  

The mere fact that you know stolen coins came from an address to another address...removes the fungibility portion. Who cares which coin was exactly the coin that was part of a scam? The point is that some of them (or all of them) are linked to a known crime/theft/scam.

NOT KNOWING which exact coin is related to a scam/crime/theft is not the way I would define bitcoin being "PERFECTLY FUNGIBLE".

I think you have your concepts/terminology mixed up.

I think not. What you are observing is a result of Bitcoin's traceability.

If I can obfuscate the provenance of what you call a "tainted" coin by use of crypto and other technologies then no one will refuse it.

It seems to me you are the one confusing terminologies. Bitcoin does not discriminate one coin from another. Within the system they are perfectly fungible. Only human preferences and personal subjective value could lead one coin to be refused.

http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/

imbécilités

Bitcoin uses no such things as blacklists nor does it taint coins. If such a list exist it is maintained by fiat interests and the rational thing to do is to avoid doing business with such entities.

If you participate into a transactions under such "rules" it is your voluntary choice as this is not how Bitcoin is ought to be used. Being that it is a peer-to-peer currency the only occasion where you should encounter such problem is when dealing with exchanges & USGians "bitcoin wallet services".

What you are looking at is an history of outputs. Each units within the system is indistinguishable.

And btw I don't have to go to china I can do it in my backyard.  

[1715365802]

1715365802

[smoothie]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3mea6b/bitpay_is_blacklisting_certain_bitcoins_rejecting

thanks for the link. I will put it in the OP.

[brg444]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Indeed, and as you explain we have established that Bitcoin is "technically fungible" which is really all that matters. Fungibility is a property inherent to a system. It is not dependent on human preferences.

Yeah sure THAT definition of "Fungibility" of Bitcoin is not dependent upon human preferences. But who cares?

Bitcoin does not use itself. Humans do. That's what matters and that's what gives bitcoin VALUE,.....HUMANS.

If people don't accept your BTC because they have come from a path that leads back to an address of coins that were illegally taken from someone else, then fungibility in terms of its use with HUMANS is broken and not perfect. This is assuming that the receiving party of your tainted bitcoins is not accepting them.

You are basically arguing a definition that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand of why I started this thread.

The "fungibility issue" you speak of is also a human construction. One that is irrelevant to a Bitcoin economy and that is only an example of how hard wired your brain is on fiat.

[smoothie]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3mea6b/bitpay_is_blacklisting_certain_bitcoins_rejecting

 

how about you don't use fiat for your Bitcoin business?

do you understand how likely it is or easy it would be for coins to cross path with other "tainted" ones.

this is absolutely a non-issue

it's so non issue that bitpay is blacklisting certain bitcoins...yeah lol 

[smoothie]

Here's an economic concept: the market places a 10% premium on freshly minted zero-taint BTC over 'gently used' coins.  Good luck with your stolen Evolution coins!

Bitcoin doesn't meet the highest 'can't be evil' / 'can't be non-fungible' technical standard because the code may be modified with black/white/grey/red lists of forbidden/allowed coins/taints.

So no need to even get into the more significant (but more general issue) of socioeconomic interchangeability.

Collectors pay a premium for weird things. That doesn't mean that bitcoin is not fungible.
With respect to fiat, collectors have paid millions of dollars for nickels. So that doesn't change anything about fiat's fungibility.

true but just having one example of where a business/site/exchange/merchant not accepting certain bitcoins coming from certain addresses linked to a theft breaks bitcoin's fungibility in my view.

[RoadStress]

Are we going to the moon?

[brg444]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Indeed, and as you explain we have established that Bitcoin is "technically fungible" which is really all that matters. Fungibility is a property inherent to a system. It is not dependent on human preferences.

well we need to agree to disagree then.
i want to use money without thinking about thefts or checking its history.
it doesnt help me if is "technically fungible" when i cant use it that way.

You will, it's a matter of setting up the technology to do it. Monero is cool cause it comes with that feature baked in but it isn't impossible with Bitcoin.

I would also suggest that situations where you wouldn't be able to spend your coin are rare occurrences.

lol so it isn't perfectly fungible then right?

Of course nothing is impossible, but I would think that the unsettlement of the "block size" debate (pretty much one line of code) can't be decided upon. Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Even bitcoin mixers leave someone with coins tracing back to its origin (assuming some stolen were mixed).

I beg to differ on that one.

It is perfectly fungible, what I am saying is you might be stupid enough to do business with people that believe or enforce this sham of "blacklists" and "taint" but that's not Bitcoin's problem.

Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Yes

https://github.com/ElementsProject/elementsproject.github.io/blob/master/confidential_values.md

[smoothie]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Here's an economic concept: the market places a 10% premium on freshly minted zero-taint BTC over 'gently used' coins.  Good luck with your stolen Evolution coins!

Bitcoin doesn't meet the highest 'can't be evil' / 'can't be non-fungible' technical standard because the code may be modified with black/white/grey/red lists of forbidden/allowed coins/taints.

So no need to even get into the more significant (but more general issue) of socioeconomic interchangeability.

Sorry but that doesn't make any sense. The lists you speak of arbitrary human concepts. A USGian parasites kangaroo court AML/KYC bullshit.

I am confident I could trivially sell stolen Evolution coins on most p2p markets in major international cities today. Only fiat businesses such type of lowly scheme. They are a sham.

Don't let anyone ever tell you your Bitcoin is not as good as another. Individuals currently pay a premium on market because of a lack of private alternatives against traceability. This is a technological problem that will certainly be solved seeing the progress being made. When we do get there anyone still entertaining this notion that Bitcoin is not fungible will surely be looked at in a funny way and any money spent on "clean" coins will be money wasted.

http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/

How do you do that? You can't control what people choose to do.

If they don't accept your bitcoin because it was linked to a scam, that's the way it is.

There is such thing a as bitcoin taint because what if I choose not to accept bitcoins coming from the bitcoinica theft? One example of showing how fungibility does not 100% exist is enough to break your "perfect fungibility" claim.

[brg444]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3mea6b/bitpay_is_blacklisting_certain_bitcoins_rejecting

 

how about you don't use fiat for your Bitcoin business?

do you understand how likely it is or easy it would be for coins to cross path with other "tainted" ones.

this is absolutely a non-issue

it's so non issue that bitpay is blacklisting certain bitcoins...yeah lol 

Why in hell would you use bitpay  

[smoothie]

Haha. You got to br joking. That is a long way before we will make headlines for whatever rrason.

Bitpay already posted on reddit they are black listing certain bitcoin addresses.

I never said WHEN it would happen...I said EVENTUALLY it would be in the headlines of the press of normal bitcoin articles and news releases.

[brg444]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Here's an economic concept: the market places a 10% premium on freshly minted zero-taint BTC over 'gently used' coins.  Good luck with your stolen Evolution coins!

Bitcoin doesn't meet the highest 'can't be evil' / 'can't be non-fungible' technical standard because the code may be modified with black/white/grey/red lists of forbidden/allowed coins/taints.

So no need to even get into the more significant (but more general issue) of socioeconomic interchangeability.

Sorry but that doesn't make any sense. The lists you speak of arbitrary human concepts. A USGian parasites kangaroo court AML/KYC bullshit.

I am confident I could trivially sell stolen Evolution coins on most p2p markets in major international cities today. Only fiat businesses such type of lowly scheme. They are a sham.

Don't let anyone ever tell you your Bitcoin is not as good as another. Individuals currently pay a premium on market because of a lack of private alternatives against traceability. This is a technological problem that will certainly be solved seeing the progress being made. When we do get there anyone still entertaining this notion that Bitcoin is not fungible will surely be looked at in a funny way and any money spent on "clean" coins will be money wasted.

http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/

If they don't accept your bitcoin because it was linked to a scam, that's the way it is.

There is such thing a as bitcoin taint because what if I choose not to accept bitcoins coming from the bitcoinica theft? One example of showing how fungibility does not 100% exist is enough to break your "perfect fungibility" claim.

Listen, it doesn't matter what an idiot might accept or not because in a not so long future people will be desperate to purchase Bitcoin and let me tell you he will not get picky.

[smoothie]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

wow really? lol

Yes, I addressed it in another thread, here's the slightly modified version:

I'm sorry but it is increasingly apparent to me that you are making a tragic mistake of conflating very different economic concepts.

For one, individual perception of value is quite different from the market's perception of value.

Bitcoin's traceability might make it interesting for someone with a collector's mindset but it has no impact on its fungibility.

It would be one thing for the market to disagree on the value of individual satoshis but this is absolutely impossible as they are totally undistinguishable from one another. Let me use two different examples to show why your analysis fail:

- Certain gold artifacts are valued at way more important prices then the actual market worth of their weight in gold. Does that make gold a "collectible"?

- A lot of people enjoy collecting notes and coins from certain years. A bundle of cash stolen from a bank might be identified and refused in certain circumstances because of its serial number. Does that make cash a "collectible"?

These two examples, I believe, demonstrate that what you refer to as an absence of fungibility is simply a consequence of individual or authorities attaching subjective value to an item because of its history but this is not an indictment on the monetary system itself!

Imagine one individual in possession of one of these gold artifacts or a special 20$ note attempts, for some unknown reason, to either trade his gold item to a pawnshop or deposit the 20$ at the bank.

What do you guess happens? If we assume the guy running the pawnshop doesn't know or care about the "symbolic" value of the item and is only concerned with its weight in gold no amount of history is going to bring him to buy said item for more than its market worth. Same for his "special bill", the cashier at the bank could not careless if it was used by Al Capone to do lines of cocaine, to her it's worth 20$ and no more.

The same logic applies for Bitcoin. If I am in possession of one of Mt. Gox's stolen coin and send it to Bitstamp, the market is not going to offer me a premium or refuse to buy it. Sure some nerds might cry foul and alert the exchange. In that case I could still head to fucking China and sell the same coin for market price on whatever their equivalent of localbitcoin is and no one will ask me any question.

Let's pretend I have one of Satoshi's wallet address and decide to send him a bitcoin. How can you tell which one is mine from his stash?

In fact I do believe there is quite a lot of people that have sent him dust or coins over the years. If somehow he decides to move this lot of coins to an exchange are people somehow going to make a distinction between his original coins and whatever amount that was sent to him by these clowns? Of course no because they can't!

This effectively demonstrates that your logic does not hold. The market could careless whatever coin Satoshi decides to move, it is not the coins that matter because THEY ARE INDEED FUNGIBLE. It is their owner's decision that has a psychological impact on the market because they can identify ownership through the public ledger. Let's say we pretend that somehow someone is able to tie Satoshi's identity to a wallet/coins from...2013. Surely you would agree that the psychological impact on the market would be the same whether he decides to move these coins to BitStamp or the "original" ones.

All of this is to say you are confusing privacy and traceability and somehow making this aspect of Bitcoin an indictment on its fungibility. Again, this is a mistake.

Perfectly fungible is what you said. Your bolded example above proves my point that bitcoin is not perfectly fungible as in your example an exchange/site can refuse to exchange or accept a particular set of coins coming from certain addresses.


Just because you say something, doesn't make it true.  

The mere fact that you know stolen coins came from an address to another address...removes the fungibility portion. Who cares which coin was exactly the coin that was part of a scam? The point is that some of them (or all of them) are linked to a known crime/theft/scam.

NOT KNOWING which exact coin is related to a scam/crime/theft is not the way I would define bitcoin being "PERFECTLY FUNGIBLE".

I think you have your concepts/terminology mixed up.

I think not. What you are observing is a result of Bitcoin's traceability.

If I can obfuscate the provenance of what you call a "tainted" coin by use of crypto and other technologies then no one will refuse it.

It seems to me you are the one confusing terminologies. Bitcoin does not discriminate one coin from another. Within the system they are perfectly fungible. Only human preferences and personal subjective value could lead one coin to be refused.

http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/

imbécilités

Bitcoin uses no such things as blacklists nor does it taint coins. If such a list exist it is maintained by fiat interests and the rational thing to do is to avoid doing business with such entities.

If you participate into a transactions under such "rules" it is your voluntary choice as this is not how Bitcoin is ought to be used. Being that it is a peer-to-peer currency the only occasion where you should encounter such problem is when dealing with exchanges & USGians "bitcoin wallet services".

What you are looking at is an history of outputs. Each units within the system is indistinguishable.

And btw I don't have to go to china I can do it in my backyard.  

Yeah I know they are indistinguishable. The point is that you can still see where coins go on the block chain. It's all public.

We are obviously going to disagree to the end of the earth.

I love bitcoin but given my opinion of it not being fungible is a sad thing that I wish were not true.

Wouldn't it be so much easier if you did not have to avoid certain fiat payment systems that black list bitcoin addresses? Hmm I wonder what that solution would look like. 

[bitbaby]

All US money is numbered, so unless you have a large block of $100 sequential bills it is hard to trace. Fiat is traceable to a point, so is Bitcoin. I really have no idea why fungibility is so concerning. Bitcoin has mixers, convenience stores, grocery stores are fiat mixers, along with that nice restaurant you enjoy.

I don see this being an issue, but maybe my tinfoil hat isn't on tight enough?


Ufo

So if I stole bitcoin and sent it to a mixer and someone else got the coin and tried to spend it and let's say that merchant flagged that address because it was linked to a hack/scam/theft...how did mixing the coins fix anything other than allowing the thief to get away with the crime?

You're right, this flagging addresses and blacklisting transactions from addresses won't help, it will ultimately start getting abused, think about it. You sell coins to someone, a cash trade so no identities were involved and after that you go to a forum and start yelling my coins were hacked/stolen and ask Miners and others to flag that address. Now the person who bought those coins is fu**ed, he paid for them and didn't do anything wrong and he's the one who is now called a thief and can't spend his coins? I really hope no more sites start doing this and even bitpay should stop doing this, if they're really doing this i.e.

[smoothie]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Indeed, and as you explain we have established that Bitcoin is "technically fungible" which is really all that matters. Fungibility is a property inherent to a system. It is not dependent on human preferences.

Yeah sure THAT definition of "Fungibility" of Bitcoin is not dependent upon human preferences. But who cares?

Bitcoin does not use itself. Humans do. That's what matters and that's what gives bitcoin VALUE,.....HUMANS.

If people don't accept your BTC because they have come from a path that leads back to an address of coins that were illegally taken from someone else, then fungibility in terms of its use with HUMANS is broken and not perfect. This is assuming that the receiving party of your tainted bitcoins is not accepting them.

You are basically arguing a definition that is irrelevant to the discussion at hand of why I started this thread.

The "fungibility issue" you speak of is also a human construction. One that is irrelevant to a Bitcoin economy and that is only an example of how hard wired your brain is on fiat.

Even if we remove the fiat portion out of my example and replace it with something else it still holds true.

Let's use BEANIE BABIES.

Let's take my example and put BEANIE BABIES (or your favorite object or digital good or service) instead of fiat.

My point still stands.

[chennan]

All US money is numbered, so unless you have a large block of $100 sequential bills it is hard to trace. Fiat is traceable to a point, so is Bitcoin. I really have no idea why fungibility is so concerning. Bitcoin has mixers, convenience stores, grocery stores are fiat mixers, along with that nice restaurant you enjoy.

I don see this being an issue, but maybe my tinfoil hat isn't on tight enough?


Ufo

So if I stole bitcoin and sent it to a mixer and someone else got the coin and tried to spend it and let's say that merchant flagged that address because it was linked to a hack/scam/theft...how did mixing the coins fix anything other than allowing the thief to get away with the crime?

You're right, this flagging addresses and blacklisting transactions from addresses won't help, it will ultimately start getting abused, think about it. You sell coins to someone, a cash trade so no identities were involved and after that you go to a forum and start yelling my coins were hacked/stolen and ask Miners and others to flag that address. Now the person who bought those coins is fu**ed, he paid for them and didn't do anything wrong and he's the one who is now called a thief and can't spend his coins? I really hope no more sites start doing this and even bitpay should stop doing this, if they're really doing this i.e.

Yep, it's really going to hurt the currency in general if bitpay is still around for much longer, and/or other companies will start doing this too.  This will eventually lead to everyone currently trading/selling/loaning/mixing bitcoins to be stuck with some fraction of a tainted coin where everyone can't be able to do business at all, unless you are a big time miner who mints fresh coins himself and keeps them to himself.

[smoothie]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Indeed, and as you explain we have established that Bitcoin is "technically fungible" which is really all that matters. Fungibility is a property inherent to a system. It is not dependent on human preferences.

well we need to agree to disagree then.
i want to use money without thinking about thefts or checking its history.
it doesnt help me if is "technically fungible" when i cant use it that way.

You will, it's a matter of setting up the technology to do it. Monero is cool cause it comes with that feature baked in but it isn't impossible with Bitcoin.

I would also suggest that situations where you wouldn't be able to spend your coin are rare occurrences.

lol so it isn't perfectly fungible then right?

Of course nothing is impossible, but I would think that the unsettlement of the "block size" debate (pretty much one line of code) can't be decided upon. Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Even bitcoin mixers leave someone with coins tracing back to its origin (assuming some stolen were mixed).

I beg to differ on that one.

It is perfectly fungible, what I am saying is you might be stupid enough to do business with people that believe or enforce this sham of "blacklists" and "taint" but that's not Bitcoin's problem.

Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Yes

https://github.com/ElementsProject/elementsproject.github.io/blob/master/confidential_values.md

You are right it isn't bitcoin's problem. It is the user's problem.

But isn't that a cop out?

If there was a system that removed this possibility of blacklisting then I think we would be on to something.  

Bitcoin is here to serve people. If there is a problem with it, I think it should be fixed.

Block size is not something super critical that it needs to be done now...but this fungibility problem I believe is something that should be taken more seriously by the core developers.


BTW good luck with that addition to the code.

Look at how many businesses who have regulators on their backs would claw back at such a proposal that would allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY.

The core devs can't even come to an agreement on ONE LINE OF CODE and yet you expect them to add many lines of code that change the social contract of bitcoin and have the network/ECONOMY accept it?

[smoothie]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3mea6b/bitpay_is_blacklisting_certain_bitcoins_rejecting

 

how about you don't use fiat for your Bitcoin business?

do you understand how likely it is or easy it would be for coins to cross path with other "tainted" ones.

this is absolutely a non-issue

it's so non issue that bitpay is blacklisting certain bitcoins...yeah lol 

Why in hell would you use bitpay  

I don't use them.

[brg444]

All US money is numbered, so unless you have a large block of $100 sequential bills it is hard to trace. Fiat is traceable to a point, so is Bitcoin. I really have no idea why fungibility is so concerning. Bitcoin has mixers, convenience stores, grocery stores are fiat mixers, along with that nice restaurant you enjoy.

I don see this being an issue, but maybe my tinfoil hat isn't on tight enough?


Ufo

So if I stole bitcoin and sent it to a mixer and someone else got the coin and tried to spend it and let's say that merchant flagged that address because it was linked to a hack/scam/theft...how did mixing the coins fix anything other than allowing the thief to get away with the crime?

You're right, this flagging addresses and blacklisting transactions from addresses won't help, it will ultimately start getting abused, think about it. You sell coins to someone, a cash trade so no identities were involved and after that you go to a forum and start yelling my coins were hacked/stolen and ask Miners and others to flag that address. Now the person who bought those coins is fu**ed, he paid for them and didn't do anything wrong and he's the one who is now called a thief and can't spend his coins? I really hope no more sites start doing this and even bitpay should stop doing this, if they're really doing this i.e.

we're a long way from this ever happening and even if it did that is precisely why you need decentralization in mining.

either way in a Bitcoin economy this person could trivially exchange this Bitcoin through a peer to peer transaction for goods and services.

[smoothie]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Here's an economic concept: the market places a 10% premium on freshly minted zero-taint BTC over 'gently used' coins.  Good luck with your stolen Evolution coins!

Bitcoin doesn't meet the highest 'can't be evil' / 'can't be non-fungible' technical standard because the code may be modified with black/white/grey/red lists of forbidden/allowed coins/taints.

So no need to even get into the more significant (but more general issue) of socioeconomic interchangeability.

Sorry but that doesn't make any sense. The lists you speak of arbitrary human concepts. A USGian parasites kangaroo court AML/KYC bullshit.

I am confident I could trivially sell stolen Evolution coins on most p2p markets in major international cities today. Only fiat businesses such type of lowly scheme. They are a sham.

Don't let anyone ever tell you your Bitcoin is not as good as another. Individuals currently pay a premium on market because of a lack of private alternatives against traceability. This is a technological problem that will certainly be solved seeing the progress being made. When we do get there anyone still entertaining this notion that Bitcoin is not fungible will surely be looked at in a funny way and any money spent on "clean" coins will be money wasted.

http://trilema.com/2014/guidance-there-is-no-such-thing-as-bitcoin-taint/

If they don't accept your bitcoin because it was linked to a scam, that's the way it is.

There is such thing a as bitcoin taint because what if I choose not to accept bitcoins coming from the bitcoinica theft? One example of showing how fungibility does not 100% exist is enough to break your "perfect fungibility" claim.

Listen, it doesn't matter what an idiot might accept or not because in a not so long future people will be desperate to purchase Bitcoin and let me tell you he will not get picky.

Yeah but that is for a shorter time period. Im talking decades on into the future.

Sure the financial world economy will crumble to a certain extent. But there will be a tomorrow in the financial realm.

Why not just fix the issue? I can answer that...the social contract would then be broken.

Any bitcoin business that went along with say adding code that obfuscated transactions to a point that there is unlinkability and untraceability would have problems with regulators assuming they were AML/KYC compliant etc or whatever the regulation is.

[brg444]

Bitcoin is perfectly fungible. Anyone who claims otherwise is confusing economic concepts.

we already had this discussion.
maybe bitcoin is technically fungible (because any coin can always be send an mixed) but practically you have problems when using coins which where stolen (eg bitstamp hack) or why do you think new minted coins are sold with a premium?

Indeed, and as you explain we have established that Bitcoin is "technically fungible" which is really all that matters. Fungibility is a property inherent to a system. It is not dependent on human preferences.

well we need to agree to disagree then.
i want to use money without thinking about thefts or checking its history.
it doesnt help me if is "technically fungible" when i cant use it that way.

You will, it's a matter of setting up the technology to do it. Monero is cool cause it comes with that feature baked in but it isn't impossible with Bitcoin.

I would also suggest that situations where you wouldn't be able to spend your coin are rare occurrences.

lol so it isn't perfectly fungible then right?

Of course nothing is impossible, but I would think that the unsettlement of the "block size" debate (pretty much one line of code) can't be decided upon. Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Even bitcoin mixers leave someone with coins tracing back to its origin (assuming some stolen were mixed).

I beg to differ on that one.

It is perfectly fungible, what I am saying is you might be stupid enough to do business with people that believe or enforce this sham of "blacklists" and "taint" but that's not Bitcoin's problem.

Yet you think the developers of bitcoin can add an entire set of code to allow UNLINKABILITY and UNTRACEABILITY?

Yes

https://github.com/ElementsProject/elementsproject.github.io/blob/master/confidential_values.md

You are right it isn't bitcoin's problem. It is the user's problem.

But isn't that a cop out?

If there was a system that removed this possibility of blacklisting then I think we would be on to something.  

Bitcoin is here to serve people. If there is a problem with it, I think it should be fixed.

Block size is not something super critical that it needs to be done now...but this fungibility problem I believe is something that should be taken more seriously by the core developers.

Look you are fighting a strawman here I absolutely agree that privacy and traceability matters need to be addressed but fundamentally disagree that this issue has anything to do with Bitcoin intrinsic fungibility.

The problem is that users are not yet using it as intended. Most people are still dealing with third parties and traditional financial institutions when dabbling in their "Bitcoin finance".

No individual is actively aware of "tainted" coins and it makes absolutely no sense for them to be if they follow proper business etiquette. Stolen coins is 99% of the time the result of suckers who were irresponsible with their coins.