Topic: Is Bitcoin currency or goods? Fungible or not? - page 3. (Read 5216 times)

Hmm good explanation , yes the only big barriers for bitcoin to the moon now is all gov in the world dont want to support bitcoin as new currency.
Some of them reject and give warning about bitcoin but they put tax on that 

Bitcoin for me is a good because it hasn't inflaction and price is not stable, and if i give a price to bitcoin, for me bitcoin is a good.

. Bitcoins can be divided up into 8 decimal places

. They can be transferred to anywhere in the world

. They can not be controlled by a third party, you own any Bitcoins in your wallet, unless they get stolen or lost of course

. There is a set number of them, so we know exactly the maximum number of coins that will ever be created

. As time goes on because the currency is open source more and more tools are being created to make trading with coins easier

. All transactions are on a blockchain that can be viewed by anyone, so you know you have received money and it is legitimate if you can see it on the blockchain

. The proof of work concept makes double spending and fraud involving sending and receiving money impossible

. Transactions can't be reversed so all deals are final once they go through


Just because a government declares Bitcoin isn't fungible or some economics 'expert' doesn't make it so, we've seen how these people are often openly hostile towards Bitcoin and will make up anything they like to try and scare people away from using it.

Bitcoins are somewhat fungible, but not completely. It's like a family tree. You can't say "this bitcoin was at location Y 2 years ago" any more than you can say "Person X was 1000 years ago person Y". But you can say "This Bitcoin can be traced back to this transaction from 2 years ago" just like you can say "Person Y who lived 1000 years ago is an ancestor of person X".

Just like a person can have millions of ancestors and descendants, so can a bitcoin trace back or forward to millions of bitcoins. But since some bitcoins can be traced back to a particular transaction/address and some cannot, they are not completely fungible, and different bitcoins may be worth more or less.

Here is an example of someone offering to pay 2 "ordinary" bitcoins for 1 bitcoin that can be traced back to the historic transaction of buying pizza for 10K BTC.

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-fungibility-essential/

Why Bitcoin Fungibility is Essential

Recently, it has become fashionable in some bitcoin circles to suggest that blacklisting, or the more palatable term of redlisting, can be implemented to discourage the large-scale stealing of bitcoin wallets or even the ransom demands of petty criminals like CryptoLocker. Either way, it boils down to some form of coin validation with the more insidious side effect being government collusion with the coin validators for purposes of linking individuals to all of their transactions.

I voted same as you as it has history of owners. So each bit of coin is different. But all oil is the same?
It's like saying that all humans look/are the same, or all silver coins are the exact same which they are not.
Like snow flakes..

I think it's not actually money but the movement/system of it. Like a gold mine creators workers truckers refiners sellers etc. all rolled into one package.

I was reading the user klee who was hacked of 1170 bitcoins (apparently he got some back from the thief) and the issue to me was if bitcoin is like stolen cash or stolen goods?  If BTC is like stolen cash, which is considered "fungible", then there's no legal requirement it be returned, unless the owner knew it was stolen (that's why banks will mark bank robber money with red dye bombs).  By contrast, stolen goods are must be returned by law, even if the buyer had no reason to know the goods were stolen.

If you read the below, due to an US IRS ruling, it is believed that bitcoins are considered "goods" so stolen BTC can be traced and returned to the rightful owner, if the theft was in the USA.  But there has not yet been a court ruling to this effect.  However, due to the blockchain tracing all transactions, I bet some judge rules that BTC are more like non-fungible goods than fungible currency.

TonyT

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/31/bitcoin-legally-property-irs-currency

Adam Levitin is a law professor at Georgetown University, and he believes that the ruling means that bitcoin can never be treated as "fungible" – a term from economics which refers to the fact that particular instances of a good are interchangeable. So, for instance, crude oil is fungible, because if a trader buys a gallon of it, they don't care which gallon they get. Fine art is not fungible, because which work they get matters a huge amount.

But the really interesting problems will come when a similar treatment is applied to criminal law.

In many legal systems, receipt of stolen property is treated very differently to receipt of stolen money. If a pawn shop accepts a stolen bike, its operators are expected to return it to its rightful owner if discovered, without reward. If a coffee shop takes a stolen fiver, it can keep it.

Until someone brings a case to court, it's impossible to say definitively which version would happen with bitcoin. But the IRS ruling suggests that, in America at least, it could be the former.

In other words, if you think the hassle of having to file taxes on your bitcoin is bad, just wait til the shop you're spending them in has to check to make sure they aren't stolen before you can make a purchase at all.