Topic: Do you think Bitcoin is fungible? (Read 636 times)

Although in my opinion BTC was designed with the intention of being fungible, the regulations and the infamous practices of centralized exchanges (CEXs) can't be ignored unfortunately.
To help the community navigate this issue, I’ve been developing a free tool to check if your BTC funds are tainted: scoremycrypto.com.
Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

You are missing the point here. BTC isn't fungible because it can be replaced with another coin in the future, that is not it, because they would never be of the same value. BTC is fungible because it can be be replaced with another asset of equal value, i.e. if i borrow you 1 BTC, i do not need you to return exactly the 1 BTC i borrowed to you, you can return a different utxo to me as long as it is worth 1 BTC, or you could even give me 0.5 BTC twice, which makes up one BTC, that is the fungibility we are talking about.

Bitcoin is not fungible, thanks to blockchain technology where absolutely every transaction is recorded. I bet that if Satoshi sends me 1 Bitcoin from his wallet, I will be able to sell this 1 Bitcoin very expensively or probably my wallet because I received Bitcoin from satoshi, this will be the rarest moment and it will give it a value. You have already heard about halving block, rare sats and some other nonsense. The fact that people value things like this means that Bitcoin is not fungible.
If there was no transaction history on blockchain or everything was encrypted and impossible to decrypt and we don't know who sends and receives money, then such a Bitcoin would be fungible. Monero is fungible but finally it all comes down to what we personally think. For me, Bitcoin is non fungible but for others, it really is.

I agree with you on the last part, if business blacklists Bitcoin, it won't accept Monero and if it doesn't blacklist Bitcoin, it will accept Monero.

Replaceable seems like it would have been a better word to make it look like we are not looking into changing anything. I agree that it is not going to be that easy to make that difference, but at the same time I believe that we are going to end up with a much better record.

Hopefully we should see the situation changing, it won't be that easy, and we could end up with a much worse situation in the end, I believe that we are going to end up with a result that will not be too simple ,and that's why we need to make sure that we are going to end up with a good one. Obviously it is going to take a while before people could make the difference, but I do believe that it is fungible, to me it feels like replacing is the keyword here.

We know that BTC will not live forever, and it can be use to achieve your goal if you can embrace the opportunity to invest in BTC and hodl it for a long period of time before you can sell to make profits to increase your achievement in your environment.

Since BTC is a decentralized currency over the years now, is fungible because there are some coins in the market you can buy and hodl, and they will give you profits BTC use to give to those that invested in BTC, and if BTC disappear from the market today there will be other coins people can use to replace BTC investment in the community.

I don't think it will be a matter of argument, because many people have the ideal which is the reason they don't invest what they can't afford to lose on BTC investment.

There is a local proverb in my country: "Money won't be tainted." So no way is Bitcoin tainted; mixing Bitcoin doesn't change anything except increase privacy. It's always fungible; we can trade or do whatever we like with our Bitcoin. The money could be used for any purpose, but that but that doesn't mean it's tainted when used for crime. The way we spending money won't be tainted but money itself won't. So Bitcoin is a currency that exists online. It can't be tainted and is always fungible. 

From other people's responses /reviews to your questions is bitcoin fungible?
The fungibility of bitcoin is personal as some people are looking out to avoid tainted coins

Judging by the 840000 block craziness, I'm willing to bet 1 BTC that if someone (maybe Satoshi, or maybe someone else) could move 1 BTC from Satoshi's stash (especially from the early blocks), then you would find plenty of buyers willing to pay a 100%, 200%, maybe even 500% premium.

We may argue that 1 BTC = 1 BTC, but the market has the final word.

I disagree with Antonopoulos that 1 EUR = 1 EUR, because I've seen plenty of cases where collectors sell rare euro coins for a hefty premium.

In general, yes, if you go to a store, they don't care if it's a rare or less-rare euro, they'll accept it at its face value.

But you cannot stop the market from doing its own thing. Collectors will always exist (hoarding collectibles is a DNA instinct).

For me stamps have no special value, but for collectors they do. Same with Ordinal NFTs and other stuff.

1 pussy = 1 pussy

Right?

4 billion pussies max cap (currently)...

But the (sexual) market has decided that different pussies have different value (aka SMV).

There's also this:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kimchi-premium.asp
https://forkast.news/kimchi-premium-7pct/
https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/what-is-kimchi-premium-how-can-we-calculate-kimchi-premium/

Different places, different market conditions...

Well it's a bit more complex than that. A grocery store won't be doing any background checks and asking for proof of income, so in that situation fiat is fungible - a criminal can walk in with a stolen credit card and pay with it. But generally when doing large value transactions your bank will ask about the source of your money if they have a reason to - like if you are getting $3,000 paychecks every month, and suddenly deposit millions in cash.

BlackHat, I understand how strong and enthusiastic you may have become and, to be very honest - I'm not against it  frfr To a point that It's almost impossible to convince you otherwise (which isn't my motive)... Ehnnn, but the sad part is that the truth can't be diverted for your interest sake.

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Bitcoin has all the criterias to be called a "fungible coin" - ofcourse the value of 1/4, 1/5 of 1 BTC still equals the wholesome coin ^{[This is the base and your own very perspective of understanding fungibility]}... The transparency of the blockchain has slowly been made a target...Do you not believe just as they've proven that - atleast 38 - 46% of Bitcoin transactions(on the blockchain) are "tainted coins"? And that most of these coins don't get redeemed at the same price tag? Look, I don't have anything against Bitcoin itself - but I can't vouch that peeps are patronizing them mixers for nothing sake!

blackhat pretends to not care about taint... but he does care.. thats why he thinks mixers are needed

also you have things the wrong way
fiat is money (a common medium of exchange)
anything can be currency(even sexual favours from your wife in exchange for getting her a gucci purse)
currency is a broad term which has sub categories: money(legal tender(fiat)), asset, commodity
money WAS valued, pegged to a commodity when backed by gold. because gold is a commodity
but money does not need to be a commodity to be money.
the features of commodity of money were replaced by laws of value (tax, min wage, accountancy, fines, debts)
yep fiat is backed by something even now.. government laws which make it circulate commonly as a medium of exchange

also if you want to be informed learn the word fungible
commodity has closer features of fungible. such as all wheat on the commodity market is treated as the same quality/product even if grown slightly differently on different farms
however we know not all wheat is the same.. in reality.. outside the commodity stock market
some wheat can have disease, have less/more wheat germ, be GMO, organic, etc

thats why fungibility IN REALITY is not a yes or no. its a scale.. and yes majority can be treated similarly, but that does not mean all are equal. its a scale not a binary option

however money is not binary option fungible, people treat and value money differently based on geo politics, local values and labour differences, taxes, etc

take some real world experiments
if you had a $100 bank note. and some stranger came upto you and said "nice bank note, can i have it.. i have here a $100 you can have"
the initial REALISTIC response is not to just say yes. but instead in the real world you would question what that strangers motives are and you would presume his bank note is dodgy as he seems a little too eager to get your note but relinquish his own so easily

so people dont treat things equally, they do question the other persons holding

if btc was truly fungible (in your definition) there would be no reason for mixers
now ask yourself why do you and blackhat need mixers.. i dont need the answer but ask yourself and be honest to yourself

we all know the answer. but it time you start telling the truth to yourself

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the only reason blackhat is obsessed with promoting btc is fungible is to con innocent people into giving up their clean coin so he can off load his dirty coin..
if he really thought it was fungible he would not want/need/promote/be part of mixing. he would just hoard his coin as is and not look to recruit victims to offload his dirty coin to

XMR can't be tracked so you are always bearing a risk when you use it on the centralized services and businesses, that's if you can find any business that accepts your monero. No business, no risk. Only happy hodling.


From their point of view, people who buy these tainted coins without a discount are the dumb ones. They take the risk for free.


Same here, wanna keep this up for another hour?  

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.

XMR is 100% fungible, unlike bitcoin. That's why the government doesn't like it and centralized exchanges are delisting it.

Say you received 1 btc from ISIS and sent it to whirlpool... when the coin is mixed, the authority won't be able to know if your coins came from ISIS or not. This time, you are bearing the risk of using mixed coins. You exchanged one risk for another. The gov don't like that too.


Certain coins can be traded for a 50% discount indeed. Do you deny it? Are you saying it never happened? Do you claim people will never buy bad coins for a discount?

Bisq's liquidity is another topic. It certainly lacks liquidity. That's another fact. Do you deny that too?

If nobody accepted bitcoin, bitcoin wouldn't have a price. You are selling 1 coin for a million dollars. You are the only seller on the market. There are no buyers. What's the worth of that coin? Zero or one million dollars?


You said people use dex and trade their tainted coins all the time and I asked how many people? I see there are only ~250 offers for FIAT/BTC pair. The volume on bisq is indeed booming /s

Andreas knows his shit, definitely more than you do. :/

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.

Agreed.


They are taking the risk of getting questioned by the police and possibly doing time. That's the risk they are taking for buying these tainted coins. You are willing to take that risk for free. Do you think it is smart? Not from their point of view. You brought decentralized solutions to the discussion but last time I checked, bisq was a ghost town and exchanges like eXch aren't really decentralized. When they have a volume above the limit, it will ring a bell and the gov will take it down just like how they did it to chipmexer.



Every other single person out there who's using dex's and how many are there of those people actually? Can you give me a number? And compare it to the people that use centralized exchanges maybe? What is the rate? 1 to 100? 1 to 1000? 1 to 10.000? There aren't as many people that use dex's. as you think there are.

Right now there are 173 offers for the EUR/BTC pair and 68 offers for the USD/BTC pair on bisq.


Let's hear what Andread Antonopoulos has to say about this.



At minute 3:40, He says  bitcoin is fungible-ish. He doesn't say it is fungible. He says exchanges are starting to reject some coins and that's becoming a problem. Before he talks about that, he explains what fungible is.

I'll copy paste it too:



At 1:24, His explanation is spot on, money is fungible indeed. He said FIAT are also fungible because nobody checks their serial numbers but that's not true for banks. Banks do check them from time to time. He was wrong there. Yes normal every day people and businesses don't have the patience or resources to check the serial number of a dollar bill. I said this in my first post in this topic too. With bitcoin, chain analysis is much faster and automated so it doesn't apply to bitcoin. Exchanges do check bitcoin's history on the block chain. He is also missing something else there, FIAT is not money, I'll come back to this later.


You are not more informed than blackhat on this matter sadly. Do you know what is more dangerous than being uninformed? Being half-informed.

Money is fungible. It is because money is a commodity. Every commodity can become money. Rice, tobacco, coffee, water, gold, copper... Some are obviously more practical than the others. Gold coins are definitely more practical than water for example. Commodities are fungible.

FIAT is not money. It is a currency. (It used to be money when it was backed by gold, a commodity. Now it is backed by nothing.) That's the difference between a gold coin and a dollar bill. One of them is money, the other one is currency. Bitcoin? Bitcoin is close to be money because it is "fungible-ish". It is not fungible. "Fungible-ish", means its position can change from situation to situation. In the USA, it is not really fungible. In Russia? It is fungible probably since no Russian business will care.

If you can sell you hacked coin to some careless or uninformed people, it is fungible for you because people like blackhat will take these coins without thinking about the consequences of their actions.  How many of those people are there? Definitely not as many as blackhat thinks. Maybe he doesn't live in EU or USA where people get punished for that kind of stuff.

Of course it's fungible. I don't know why is that even a question. The whole NFT market was created to be "non-fungible" because coins and tokens are fungible, just like Bitcoin.

By itself, alone?
No. The blockchain is not private. It obviously needs to be public.

But you are removing "mixers or any other interference" out of the equation. They are an intrinsic part of the Bitcoin ecosystem and everything connected to it through decentralized, non-custodial, open source methods.

So yes, Bitcoin is technically only fungible because of what is built on top but it has the intrinsic 'methods' to be made fungible in the first place. Therefore it is intrinsically fungible.

Since the majority of BTC users do not differentiate between individual satoshis, yes, it is fungible.

There always will be and have been extreme cases where a unit of some fungible token is traded for more or less than the consensus value. See numismatics, the collection of old or special coins for example. If the Fed issues a commemorative coin, it still has a face value, that makes it exchangeable like any other coin. Same with inscribed satoshis.

let wait a few years for black hat to have a real revelation

money is not fungible
money does not have to be fungible

blackhat just thinks a narrow path that fits whatever he is promoting

2 people working the same job same hours same location.. one only needs to work 40 minutes for $10, the other works an hour for $10

walking between 2 shops on same major road. $2 can buy a whole loaf of bread, however a mile away that same $2 wont be enough to buy a whole loaf of same brand bread, same day within 20 minutes..

money does not mean the same value to different people

heck even someone receiving $100 from a relative on their birthday is treated differently by the tax man than someone receiving $100 from a days income from work. or $100 in investment gains from a investment sell

1btc to someone in a icelandic/slavic region is worth $25k of mining cost
1btc to someone in the pacific island regions is worth $110k of mining cost
1btc to the market traders is worth $67k

someone would prefer to mine a fresh mined coin for a premium than receive mixed coin even at discount

• 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.

There are way more similarities than differences between those two words; only that the latter would mean - being given permission based on user's discretion - Big question is, do the government seek a user's attention to snoop into their TRN history? Secondly, do you not know that the blockchain is served as a public ledger? Which means, in most cases, without mixers or any other interference, there's absolutely no guarantee for privacy?
The sentence on quote from my post (which isn't part of this particular point) has a correlation with these; without a robust procurement for "anonymity/privacy", Bitcoin isn't entirely "fungible"!

I think you're both confusing privacy with anonymity. Bitcoin was never anonymous and it cannot stop the government from snooping on you through centralized means. (Although you could maintain anonymity as well as privacy, if you really wanted to.)

That's the point!! But I think that's not just gonna workout immediately..YeS! All we ever wanted was having Bitcoin  as a full-fledge decentralized coin Thus, the lightening network was made for offchain transactions ^{[without having to be recorded on the block chain already]}. Mixers are also on the same spot, all to fully achieving bitcoiner's anonymity..
The governs are fully aware of the loopholes in transacting "tainted" coins, which is why they're issuing out censorships.
If Bitcoin's original plan was total privacy, what's the essence of the blockchain? This isn't supposed to be an argument BlackHat, Bitcoin isn't fungible^{[and you know 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.

Ok. I swap my mixxed Bitcoin for Monero, send that Monero between wallets and swap that Monero back for a mixxed Bitcoin. Explain how you would justify or even filter out a "tainted" Bitcoin in this situation. The fact that you cannot tear up a 1 dollar bill and reconstitute it with the parts of a different dollar bill is what makes it non-fungible. The same cannot be said for 1 Bitcoin.

part of a AML investigation is for CEX to analyse coins.. let the transaction process but report it authorities if it meets a suspicion threshold
if they get an alert back in the form of court order then the CEX would freeze an account, but the CEX cannot explain why. its then upto the authorities to contact the user and explain when the authorities are ready with their investigation..
yep under court order and AML policy CEX cant explain or inform a user is under investigation
yep under AML policy CEX cant freeze/seize funds without a court order

CEX's that dont quite follow all of regulations adopt their own business practices of putting terms&conditions into their user agreements that pretty much give them permission to halt account activity.. so its worth reading regulations and specific T&C's of CEX you use, to see if your coins will be held up by regulation after a certain point. or earlier by businesses own T&C's
most ethical CEX wont add on T&C's that hold onto funds without a court order. most they will do is stop facilitating service and just ask you to withdraw funds without a regulator court order


'pushtx' is a known term to push a tx directly to mining pool
some mining pools have their own communication page to cut and paste your rawtx(hex) to them directly. where they have deals inplace for that access page

Well, yes bitcoin is fungible because we can exchange it for fiat and once that happens we can use it to buy prime commodities that we need every day. And not only does it become a form of investment in the short and long-term, it also becomes an opportunity for unemployed people and opportunities for business people.

Apparently, everything that bitcoin can do is here to help all people who will understand and find out how it can contribute to the lives of every individual, right?

I've never done it myself, so I don't know how exactly they do it.

Obviously there should be a way to push it to a specific mempool, otherwise the risk of randomness is not worth it...

And of course you'd need some "networking" in regards to pool owners to cut such a deal.

You'd never use them, but the guy who sold you the house most likely would.

And in that case, the police would knock your door... you'd have some explaining to do.

I know people who bought their first house with Bitcoin. Due to ridiculous rent prices (it's not just Airbnb) it makes sense for someone to buy a house if he can afford it.

Yes I have heard about deals like that before.


Amazing.  



Might be. I am getting my coins from an exchange and sig camp payments. I don't have any other coin income. So If my sig camp payments are tainted, It might cause me problems. I heard binance locking people's accounts randomly without a reason and these people did their KYC already. That might be the reason why they do that.


Fungi.

Let's see what fungibility means again.


"One part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity"

So, when cryptosize above said, people can take them bad coins for a discount, his example already violated the description of fungible. And when nobody wants these tainted coins, that means these coins can't act as currency anymore. If nobody wants them, they ain't fungible. They can't perform. They can't function. (except for you, to you they are still fungible. The FBI will buy that story I think, good luck  )

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btw this description of fungible is the first result on google. I didn't cherry pick it.

answered and asked

you do a deal with a pool to specifically handle your transactions and not broadcast it to the relay network but purposefully send it to a specific pool

now you know this, care to wonder why the junk scammers are soo happily spending their scam wins as fee's...
1+1=2

this cleaning trick has been used for a while now.. and the cat is out of the bag.. its why government are now trying to identify miners at the electric supply(mining electric tax) and also at the income/gains side (reward splits/payout) to see whom gets more than deserved to find whom are doing these deals

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?

Regarding your question, I think some people would accept them, but they would probably ask for a discount (maybe up to 50%). Paying 0.5 BTC for 1 "tainted" BTC would seem like a good deal. As always, it's the free market that dictates what should be done.

Some would even exchange it for XMR afterwards, temporarily at least.

Let's ask the question again but this time change it a little bit.

This time blackhat wants to buy some gold and I happen to have some gold on sale. Blackhat can't buy it from somewhere else for some reason and I am his only option. Here is the catch, I stole the gold coins (coins don't have serial numbers on them) from a jewelry store. I am a thief but blackhat doesn't know it. To him, I am a legitimate seller.

Would he take that deal?

I'd bet he would.

What if someone tries to use LukeDashjr's stolen 216 BTC? (I have no idea if he got them back)

In that case I think it's fair to do some tracing and return them to the owner...

Drugs don't bother me that much TBH, but stealing someone's BTC is another thing.

Another possible scenario I can think of:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/house-sold-in-portugal-for-3-bitcoin-in-countrys-first-ever-direct-transaction

Let's say that you spent 3 BTC to buy a house...

What happens if the new BTC owner decides to deposit them to a CEX for instant fiat liquidation?

Most people will argue "hodl, don't sell for fiat", but personally I consider it a miracle for a no-coiner to accept BTC as a currency. Hodling/studying 4-year cycles takes another whole level of effort/discipline, so you cannot expect that from everyone.

What if that 3 BTC is deemed to be "tainted"?

Because, you know, when you buy a house, the state knows who you are, it's not an anonymous transaction for some weed, so prepare yourself for some trouble if even a single satoshi is deemed "tainted"...

Let’s say you want to buy some bitcoins but you can’t buy it from an exchange for some reason and I happen to own some coins on sale. So are you telling me, it wouldn’t make any difference to you if I wanted to sell you some coins with very bad history? (Maybe Isis used my coins to fund their operations or I got my coins from an exchange hack and I am that hacker) I want to sell you my coins directly, without using any third party exchange/mixer. Would you take this deal? (You want to buy coins and I am the only option you have, this is the situation basically)

According to your logic, you should.

If you say “no”, now you see why it matters.

It is exactly the reason why some bad people use mixers too. It is because they can't spend these coins. Nobody wants them.

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.

Are you saying btc coming from a certain mixer/casino and binance are the same? Many exchanges surely don't treat them the same way. Coinbase for example don't like it if your coins coming from an online casino (so I've heard)


Not by the general public. No big business accepts monero. I don't know (m)any at least I can say that much. People do p2p deals probably.

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)

If you can track its history, how can it be fungible? FIAT is not fungible too as every physical currency bill has a serial number on it. We usually think FIAT is fungible because nobody checks its serial number when they receive the money. So bitcoin can be fungible if the merchant doesn't care where your coins coming from.

Big companies, exchanges, banks are not careless like every day small business owners. They always track the history of the money you bring to them. If it is not possible to track it, then that's what I would call fungible.

Gold & Silver coins, Monero are indeed fungible as it is impossible to tell who owned them before. The problem with these is, they are dead currencies. Nobody is using monero, gold/silver coins to purchase something so the gov don't care about them.

It is not a surprise why the US gov going crazy on bitcoin mixers. Mixers ruin their job. People are using bitcoin a lot unlike gold/monero.

How do you know that your transaction will end up in that specific pool and not somewhere else (maybe even a random solo miner)?

the bitcoin network does filter transactions and UTXO's thats its job
you can only spend a utxo whos endpoint is unspent and has a valid path back to its original blockreward creation
and its current endpoint is known and associated with a publickey which the network knows which publickey can move which funds
you cant randomly pick any utxo and use it.. you have to use one thats been assigned to you and you have the keypair of to move that
..that is the security of the network. preventing random users treating all coin the same and swappable.. you only get control of coin you control and the network doesnt let people pick random utxo/coins

there is only one way to stop one taint path and create a new utxo with no taint path, and blackhat does not like people talking about it as it ruins his business plan of mixing

but for all other people interested
if you do a deal with a mining pool whereby you will pushtx your coin privately to them as a transaction spending your coin as fee's (to them). (destroying coinage/taint) that then becomes fresh new coin as a coin reward(the fee excess)
this new coin has no taint(it appears on blockchain as new mined coin reward). which a pool can then give to a user as new coin, clean coin..
enjoy a proper way to 'clean coin', just have to do a deal with a mining pool to get it

For the mainnet it's fungible, for CEX/AML/governments it's not.

That's a really good point.

Silk Road bitcoins were deemed "tainted", until the US government decided they're not and started selling them. Voila, you now have "clean" bitcoins!

Maybe they want to have a mixer monopoly too.

Even physical money cannot always be considered fungible...

Banknotes have serial numbers for a reason.

Only metallic coins (either gold, or fiat money ones) can be considered truly fungible, since they have no serial numbers by design.

Well, fiat money is considered to be fungible, yet it has the same concept of taint. Entities like banks or some companies can freeze and reject transactions if they deemed as high risk by their algorithms, for example coming from a blacklisted country. Or when a person with no financial history suddenly deposits a huge sum in cash.

This is the reality of digitalization. It allows much easier control on the monetary flows than physical money, and governments don't want something digital yet anonymous like Monero to be widespread, so they will never allow it to be accepted by legally operating businesses.

The Bitcoin network does not filter transactions and UTXOs, everything can go through as long it is properly validated, meaning it is fungible. BUT...

The influence of centralized, third party services is high and is only growing with most of the trading going on there. Sure those services can lose some users with their silly rules but they have 5 more willing to register and submit themselves to all the requirements and regulation they will be put through. You are now having less window to trade your Bitcoin as you wish and need to be extra careful with it.  If over 65% of the exchange market starts to filter bitcoins based on their arbitrary rules it is becoming less fungible.

It is inherently fungible, but that feature needs to be protected by keeping channels that see it that way in business.

- Jay -

In the cryptocurrency ecosystem space anything "tainted" is nonsense and if Monero is "tainted" but bitcoin can't be. And with that bitcoin can't be fungible. Developers have been trying to create coins that look similar like bitcoin and use it to lure people to invest in it but it doesn't work.

Even though you bring it from the literally perspective it can be fungible because "1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin" as the Op said. There are many similar bitcoin related coins in the ecosystem but none can withstand with bitcoin because their prices are still very far below $1. Even the Monero the Op used as the example for the fungible is doing well more than those nonsense coins. And if you talk about others I will not have problem but remove bitcoin from the fungible argument.

If we go to literal meaning of fungible that yes BTC is fungible because it can be replaced by another BTC and both are equal in worth and value but the fact that it can be replaced makes it fungible.

Now if we talk about with facts and brain then the term fungible has no place in crypto world. What I mean to say is why someone will replace a BTC by BTC there is no point to that. No coin is fungible if we come out of the literal meaning.

MAJORITY are fungible because only a MINORITY are mixed/used by criminals
fungibility had nothing to do with total circulation or decimals, its more to do with utxo references and spending paths

Bitcoin is fungible, nobody and no government can change it.

Because Bitcoin is fungible, we have Bitcoin transactions with any bitcoin value different than round numbers. Because of fungibility, 19,689,128 BTC in circulating supply can be exchanged by many people. If it is non-fungible, actual available bitcoins for circulation will be very smaller because many bitcoins will be locked.

In addition, miners get transaction fee because Bitcoin is fungible. It is unrealistic to get transaction fee in only round numbers of bitcoin.

firstly fungible is not a 2(yes no) option answer.. its more of a scale, whereby some coins are less fungible than others

blackhat has to explain his version of fungible

because trading coins yes MAJORITYare 1btc=1btc

but investigating coins no, not all coins are the same as they all have unique identifiers (utxo references) which are linked to previous utxo spends.
for instance people would react more if just 10btc moved from an address of satoshis(the unspent of satoshi->hal address) compared to someone moving 10btc from a different stash more recent
where different coins are more important than the other

much like how some people value 1950's dimes more then 2020 dimes (hint: older ones were 90% silver)
or how mis printed/mis minted coins/notes are worth more then face value

oh and by the way
if he really thinks every coin is fungible.. then he needs to quit his day job promoting mixing to hide the infungibilities

yep
funny part is he pretends to say all coins dont have a thing called taint to make it seem to victims that mixing is safe to be handed dirty coins
yet, if dirty coins were safe(in his delusion) then why need to mix them? (rhetorical question)

the real thing is coins can be investigated and treated differently but he wants idiots to become victims to hand over their clean coins to scammers/creeps/perves and criminals.. so those weirdos can run off with victims clean coins.. whilst trying to promote to idiots that its safe and not a threat for innocent people to give up their clean un-criminally linked coins.. and be given dirty coins, which innocent victoms then have to explain to investigators why they have possession of dirty coins..

in short.. if your coins are good and clean dont give them over to mixers.. and definitely dont do it where you are not making profit from it
if you want to swap your clean coins... charge a criminal a premium.. after all you receiving dirty coins will most likely have your deposits into CEX frozen and investigated if the suspicion threshold(scale) is high enough to trigger an investigation.. which especially happens if all your coins were coming from mixing+ from a criminal stash

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as for "taint nonsense" bitcoin is a ledger every coin is accounted for as having a path back to its origin block reward creation and subsequent movement.. so taint is real.. as for businesses tagging when coins were used by certain people for certain reasons..

well if he says thats nonsense. then ill say again, why does he then promote mixing.. (rhetorically)

he is the type of person that suggests guns dont kill people... whilst he sells guns, and offers training on how to get away with murder by gunshot

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last comedy moment of blackhat

his overall mindset is if he can dupe/recruit majority into running all their coins through a mixer.. he can taint all coins as being mixed(and profit from the fee's of that business) and hope that if all coins are flagged as tainted, investigators will give up tagging all coins as mixed.. or stop investigating... but the real world wont work the way he hopes and he wont get his dream come true from his recruitees or from investigators

..
oh and he also doesnt want people knowing better ways to clean coins. as thats not the business he is in and he doesnt want people using methods not part of his business

Those who have lost money investing in Bitcoin may consider Bitcoin as such but those who have invested in Bitcoin in the right way will definitely consider Bitcoin as a safe investment platform. As far as I know about Bitcoin, many people invest through Bitcoin and many do business with Bitcoin. Investment or trading can result in loss of money if the skills are not fully applied.

You can't expect they will use their common sense because they're using double standards.

If you received coins that they said "dirty coins", your coins will be frozen and you will be asked many information, but in the end you can't access your coins.
But if they i.e. Federal Reserve confiscate the coins from criminals, they can auction the coins and they will earn money from that. Federal Reserve is actually a legal mixer since they launder from "dirty coins" to "clean coins".

Just like how it is impossible to filter out tainted fiat currency then it should be similar to bitcoin since we have mixers and other means of making bitcoin transactions more anonymous and It's just hypocrisy seeing some coins flag while in the blockchain they are all the same because this makes bitcoin Fungible as a currency

A similar situation is that I as an individual may choose not to accept my local fiat maybe cause how old it looks but when taken to the bank it will definitely be accepted.

We don't always have to know who once used our fiat currency or what they did to get it before we can use it which should be a similar situation in Bitcoin.

There are monitoring platforms that try to assess if BTC is alright or tainted, and some websites can ask for additional documentation based on the fact that some BTC was flagged somewhere as tainted. Some also have policies like not accepting Bitcoin that was mixed (using a mixer).
Such policies do raise the question of fungibility of Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is fungible, and that we shouldn't care about the notion of tainted coins. What authorities should care about is tracking money that is currently under control of criminals, but once the money is seized and released back via auctioning or exchanges, that shouldn't matter.

you can filter out tainted coins, but how costly & time consuming will that be going forward. bitcoin is suppose to be permissionless

bitcoin is operating mostly in the realm of surveillance platforms, most mainstream people fear the system - they will bend the knee and comply

the creep with only increase for people who want privacy, the controllers of this world want a top down authoritarian world government - if you think it's a conspiracy theory - they're openly telling us lol

but i agree, any business who supports KYC, freezing funds etc should be boycotted immediatedly - it's completely immoral

because of all this im gravitating more toward undergroud economy and we know monero is king

This is the real definition of fungible but it seems like the cryptocurrency community has brought in a whole different kind of concept to associate with the word ‘fungible’. If you ask crypto enthusiasts about fungibility they will most likely say that it is the concept of exchanging 1 bitcoin to another and it will still be the same.

Meaning they have the same value. But those ‘tainted’ bitcoin can be considered less desirable thus disapproving of the statement that bitcoin is fungible.

I do get that notion since bitcoin is also considered an asset and some people wouldn’t want to be involved in an asset that was involved in something dark or dirty.

The hesitation with transacting with those tainted btc just increases more because everything is public and can be linked back to you. However I still think that yes bitcoin is fungible.

fungibility is when all units are indistinguishable between one another

i.e you melt a dozen 24 carat gold coins, you can recreate them into a new set of coins

i've been censored numerous times now because i use coinjoin - that means there is bitcoin & tainted bitcoin. only a small percentage of supply is coinjoined.

lightning & onchain are not indistinguishable either, sure 1 sat is 1 sat, but they make different history on the ledger

the only thing that comes close to fungible as a cryptocurrency is monero - and the anon set is due to massively increase with upcoming upgrade.

also, with these high fees it's becoming too costly to use coinjoin / open lightning channels on bitcoin for the average user.

I agree that "tainted" Bitcoin is nonsense.

Since decentralized swaps, mixers etc. are possible for Bitcoin, it is technically impossible to filter out "tainted" coins.

If I use a decentralized atomic swap to trade my untraceable Monero for somebody's "tainted" Bitcoin, then how would the simple act of owning that Bitcoin make it legal for some third party to harass me? Even if the last owner did something illegal with that Bitcoin, that connection is severed the moment I become the new owner.

Any business that supports withholding a users funds over such unlawful reasoning such as: 'the user supposedly owns tainted coins' is a criminal business and should be avoided like the plague.

Fungibility by law means a commodity or a product that is replaceable by another item similar to the commodity or product. Bitcoin is fungible and can be bought. Bitcoin has all the characteristics of what we can described as fungible. This should not be about tainted coin or comparing it with monero. This should not even be a matter of argument.

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).