Click Here to WatchTravis Patron argues that bitcoin violates the principles of money fungibility - that each individual unit of currency being of the same value does not hold true in bitcoin.
Already, businesses are springing up that are selling bitcoin with no previous transaction fee at a premium. This violates the principle of money fungibility.
In the video, the investment analysis of bitcoin vs. gold is also discussed in depth.
Nothing new...
This is intimitely tied to the lack of privacy. The actual fungibility and privacy to expect from Bitcoin is wrongly grasped by most people, due to the technicity of the topic I suppose. Without a deep understanding of how Bitcoin works, you simply can't grasp it yourself and have to rely on other's claims. Those claims were wrongly of the kind "anonymous internet money!" for years. People did not take the same amount of precautions on silk road back then in 2012 than they do now. The perception is slowly changing, in that it is getting closer to reality. The reality did not change, and it comes to no surprise to those who could see it in the first place.
An interesting evolution to observe is the different answers given by people over time, to support their view/claim that Bitcoin is fungible.
Nowadays we're at "joinmarket does the trick!". Funnily enough this is the most trivial breach of fungibility we ever had (together with the premium for newly mined coins).
Premium for newly mined coins is
a matter of one individual's arbitrary preference and has no incidence on Bitcoin's fungibility.
To the risk of repeating myself: send these coins to an exchange and see what the market thinks of your premium.
The market will be happy not to give a shit about those clean coins. But try to send stolen coins to see what happens.
Hint:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2zrkg6/withdrawals_halted_as_stolen_evolution_coins_make/About the bolded part: it is a recurrent flawed argument. You're applying a view from the legacy decentralized world to a decentralized system. In a decentralized system such as Bitcoin, everything is about
arbitrary preference. This results in social pressure that impedes your ability to use your coins freely (and for a constant price), since this will be all based on the other party
arbitrary preference.
Fungibility is not an attribute you can achieve voluntarily. As soon as individuals can based their
preference on enough factual hindsights (such as history of outputs), fungibility is broken. The only way to achieve it is by technically not giving anyone any hindsight; that is, through privacy. See
this presentation (the first part is about Bitcoin).