Bitcoin is absolutely fungible. It can be traded, and each one’s worth as much as any other one. That’s all it takes. That’s why any of this works, to the extent that any of this works.
No conspiracy-crafting is required to explain how the first example of a new technology kinda sucks at its intended goals.
Technically bitcoin is fungible but in practice it is not fungible. Each coin has a history and coins that are suspected to have been used in unapproved places will be worth less.
Monero fixes this and all other issues with bitcoin, it’s time to move away from the legacy btc for real world purposes as it has become a failed crypto testnet.
Bitcoin’s Fungibility Graveyard. Also CEXes can and will freeze your fund. Furthermore, miners could refuse to confirm tx. This happens because coin A and coin B are not indistinguishable—some may be perceived as “dirty” “suspicious” or “high-risk”.
Monero doesn’t have this prob, as no one can distinguish the “cleanness” of coins.
The seemingly tautological, trivial equation 1 XMR = 1 XMR has some rather deep meaning. Not to say BTC is generally not fungible, but it’s not “absolutely” fungible.
The thing is, you’re not a “terrorist”, not a “kidnapper”, not a “child abuser” etc. Most of us are not. Such evildoers are relatively rare, probably less than 1% of people. Sadly, most of us are relatively poor, not having money to launder to begin with. Only less than 1% might.
Big Question: Would you prefer to destroy the privacy of every ordinary, law-abiding person, including yourself, just because less than 1% of people might abuse it? Would you insist that everyone must give up e.g. the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination because of the same reason?
There is no such thing as “a moderate amount of privacy.” Either you have it or you don’t; having privacy means that you can freely and independently decide whether or not to share some specific info about your private life with a specific person. Which is not about hiding; it’s about personal freedom.
A technology that could not exist without effectively-secret money transfers, and which lets that 1% of bastards affect the hell out of everyone else.
Those victims had no prior use for crypto. Their nightmare scenario is not a side effect of some new advance they were otherwise thrilled with. This isn’t like effectively-secret point-to-point communication, which is desirable to damn near everybody, and would obviously be used primarily for meaningless conversations like this. The ability to transfer arbitrary sums of money, unstoppably and untraceably, is the sort of thing we have laws about for damn good reasons.
Crimes done by talking can’t be reversed. Crimes done with money can… unless you set up a whole techno-libertarian shadow economy and pretend those crimes aren’t quite a fucking lot of what it’s used for.
I like to learn different points of view; some of your points are valid. This conversation is indeed meaningless for you, though, if you’re only interested in “winning” as in “I’m correct, they’re wrong. I want to correct them.” 😺
As for malware, you may agree that the root of the problem is security flaws of the said user or their OS. Even if all the cryptos are banned, such a user (executing random files, blindly believing in Big Tech…) is likely to be exploited and abused; their credit card numbers, passwords, sensitive info being stolen anyway.
Both you and I know that most of crimes in this world have nothing to do with Monero. On the other hand, quite a few people use Monero for good-will donations too, which would have been otherwise impossible. Surely you don’t want to make a donation to support Country X with transparent KYC BTC if that makes Country Y angry but you might need to visit this scary country for some reason. Maybe it’s like cars, guns, knives, etc. Cars may help criminals run away, without which some crimes would be impossible. Cars may kill a lot of people too. We know that. But we may not outlaw cars, nevertheless. Can we agree that this is actually a difficult problem, with a lot of philosophical ramifications or something like that?
The positive utility of crypto so far has been negligible.
I have to say, it is on-brand for someone glibly promoting this to ignore knock-on effects. OS security used to be so much worse. And yet - viruses at the time were mildly annoying, or simply debilitating in-the-moment. They were a constant hassle. Now they’re a weaponized threat to the government and infrastructure of nation-states. That would not have been possible, without the incentives created by these slapdash implementations of cash you can e-mail.
They still suck for the purposes people wanted them for. I’ve been into this for a while. I had Beenz. I was a proponent of Bitcoin when you could still mine on a mundane PC. I’ve been explaining fungibility to people since before NFTs came along to illustrate what happens when you fuck it up completely. I’ve seen a thousand places where merely distasteful exchanges force people to use Paypal and then everyone at some point gets shafted by Paypal.
There are many obvious problems I would like this technology to solve. There are many unexpected problems it has obviously created. Our problems remain unsolved.
The functionality you’re championing is nice, but not strictly necessary, and plainly insufficient.
Bitcoin is absolutely fungible. It can be traded, and each one’s worth as much as any other one. That’s all it takes. That’s why any of this works, to the extent that any of this works.
No conspiracy-crafting is required to explain how the first example of a new technology kinda sucks at its intended goals.
Technically bitcoin is fungible but in practice it is not fungible. Each coin has a history and coins that are suspected to have been used in unapproved places will be worth less.
Monero fixes this and all other issues with bitcoin, it’s time to move away from the legacy btc for real world purposes as it has become a failed crypto testnet.
Bitcoin’s Fungibility Graveyard. Also CEXes can and will freeze your fund. Furthermore, miners could refuse to confirm tx. This happens because coin A and coin B are not indistinguishable—some may be perceived as “dirty” “suspicious” or “high-risk”.
Monero doesn’t have this prob, as no one can distinguish the “cleanness” of coins.
The seemingly tautological, trivial equation 1 XMR = 1 XMR has some rather deep meaning. Not to say BTC is generally not fungible, but it’s not “absolutely” fungible.
… does that not make this incredibly enticing for money launderers?
Monero could be also “enticing” for a kidnapper.
The thing is, you’re not a “terrorist”, not a “kidnapper”, not a “child abuser” etc. Most of us are not. Such evildoers are relatively rare, probably less than 1% of people. Sadly, most of us are relatively poor, not having money to launder to begin with. Only less than 1% might.
Big Question: Would you prefer to destroy the privacy of every ordinary, law-abiding person, including yourself, just because less than 1% of people might abuse it? Would you insist that everyone must give up e.g. the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination because of the same reason?
There is no such thing as “a moderate amount of privacy.” Either you have it or you don’t; having privacy means that you can freely and independently decide whether or not to share some specific info about your private life with a specific person. Which is not about hiding; it’s about personal freedom.
It’s enticing for ransomware.
A technology that could not exist without effectively-secret money transfers, and which lets that 1% of bastards affect the hell out of everyone else.
Those victims had no prior use for crypto. Their nightmare scenario is not a side effect of some new advance they were otherwise thrilled with. This isn’t like effectively-secret point-to-point communication, which is desirable to damn near everybody, and would obviously be used primarily for meaningless conversations like this. The ability to transfer arbitrary sums of money, unstoppably and untraceably, is the sort of thing we have laws about for damn good reasons.
Crimes done by talking can’t be reversed. Crimes done with money can… unless you set up a whole techno-libertarian shadow economy and pretend those crimes aren’t quite a fucking lot of what it’s used for.
I like to learn different points of view; some of your points are valid. This conversation is indeed meaningless for you, though, if you’re only interested in “winning” as in “I’m correct, they’re wrong. I want to correct them.” 😺
As for malware, you may agree that the root of the problem is security flaws of the said user or their OS. Even if all the cryptos are banned, such a user (executing random files, blindly believing in Big Tech…) is likely to be exploited and abused; their credit card numbers, passwords, sensitive info being stolen anyway.
Both you and I know that most of crimes in this world have nothing to do with Monero. On the other hand, quite a few people use Monero for good-will donations too, which would have been otherwise impossible. Surely you don’t want to make a donation to support Country X with transparent KYC BTC if that makes Country Y angry but you might need to visit this scary country for some reason. Maybe it’s like cars, guns, knives, etc. Cars may help criminals run away, without which some crimes would be impossible. Cars may kill a lot of people too. We know that. But we may not outlaw cars, nevertheless. Can we agree that this is actually a difficult problem, with a lot of philosophical ramifications or something like that?
The positive utility of crypto so far has been negligible.
I have to say, it is on-brand for someone glibly promoting this to ignore knock-on effects. OS security used to be so much worse. And yet - viruses at the time were mildly annoying, or simply debilitating in-the-moment. They were a constant hassle. Now they’re a weaponized threat to the government and infrastructure of nation-states. That would not have been possible, without the incentives created by these slapdash implementations of cash you can e-mail.
They still suck for the purposes people wanted them for. I’ve been into this for a while. I had Beenz. I was a proponent of Bitcoin when you could still mine on a mundane PC. I’ve been explaining fungibility to people since before NFTs came along to illustrate what happens when you fuck it up completely. I’ve seen a thousand places where merely distasteful exchanges force people to use Paypal and then everyone at some point gets shafted by Paypal.
There are many obvious problems I would like this technology to solve. There are many unexpected problems it has obviously created. Our problems remain unsolved.
The functionality you’re championing is nice, but not strictly necessary, and plainly insufficient.