I've seen several posts lately from people willing to treat Bitcoin as non-fungible because they believe some coins are "tainted".
I'd say this is a severe threat to Bitcoin, and I wouldn't be surprised if governments use this because they can't stop Bitcoin in any other way. If people believe Bitcoin is "tainted", they won't accept it anymore. "We" should really inform people not to fall for this.
Nobody would reject a dollar bill because it has previously been used in a crime, despite the fact that
85 to 90% contains traces of cocaine. Claiming Bitcoin isn't fungible is just plain stupid.
Here's a few examples:
What's that? Are you saying Bitcoin isn't fungible?
service which i wanted to top up blocked my account.
The solution is simple: don't use services that tell you your Bitcoin is different than another Bitcoin.
I don’t tell that i will return btc. We can trace it. We can mark it.
Bitcoin is fungible. Stop trying to convince people it's not, and stop using services that treat Bitcoin as if it's not fungible.
Lmao you have no glue what are you talking about. Please stop spam in my tread if you don’t know anything about chainanalys, thx
BestChange.com should be added to this list. Even though they're not an exchange, and even though I've used them, they seem to think not all Bitcoins are equal:
Don’t you think exchangers that do not follow AML should be excluded from your site? Or at least marked as untrustworthy.
Today
netex24 exchanger sent me tainted btc. And obviously service which i wanted to top up blocked my account.
I checked transaction via AML bot:
Risk Score: 50% Medium risk transaction
Medium risk
Exchange ML Risk Veryhigh - 100%@rokuen
Thank you for the signal, we will certainly investigate the matter to find out all the details and if necessary,
will take measures to prevent this in the future. The exchanger you named is one of the largest on over-the-counter and such appeals are the matter of exception.
In any case, your situation requires our involvement. We will certainly get in touch with the service representatives to find out the technical details of your transaction and
offer them to change the counterparty, if necessary, if they use some compromised custodial service to store bitcoin.
In line with this, I am interested to know if the BestChange company subscribes to the idea that there are clean and dirty Bitcoins. I mean, yes, there are probably a lot of crimes in which Bitcoins are involved as there are countless others which involve fiat, but do you think that Bitcoins involved in these crimes are tainted and are therefore dirty and shouldn't be accepted by different Bitcoin platforms?
This is not so much our moral position, but the forced adherence to generally accepted norms. Regardless of our or anyone else's opinion, AML purity for cryptocurrency transactions has become as important a property as it is for fiat currencies. Most crypto transactions end up in centralized custodial services that adhere to standard rules for the entire global market, in particular, the fifth AML directive of the European Union (5AMLD). Therefore, in a sense, the widespread introduction of AML made BTC an analogue of NFT of the ERC-1155 standard
This site explains very well what it's all about:
Coin validation proposed to offer as a service to trace coins and try to give you a rating about how the history of the coin from your point of view and to offer that as a service to businesses. I think this could be quite dangerous because it goes back to that 17th century court case where now you could receive a coin that is perfectly valid at the time that you receive it, but a few weeks later a crime is uncovered and now your coin is tainted. So if this coin validation service is advicing many of the merchants where you would want to spend your coin at, it's tainted and now the merchant would refuse to accept your coin. That's a strange experience for you; you're holding a coin that you might have to sell at a discount to get rid of it. The aggregate effect of this might create a run on the bitcoin price. So it reopens this long-set legal principle that currency or currency units are all equal.
I can't stress enough how important this is!