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No. Oil is fungible too - any barrel of a given grade is treated the same any other - but that doesn't mean oil buyers and sellers are fences for each other. W
by vintermann 5y ago
No. Oil is fungible too - any barrel of a given grade is treated the same any other - but that doesn't mean oil buyers and sellers are fences for each other.
What you're thinking of is the "current" aspect of currency. That when I take payment for a bagel in my shop, I don't need to worry that the money used to pay me was stolen, I still get to keep it.
But this is a social, legal concept, not a technological one. Calling it a currency won't make it current. Fungibility doesn't make anything current either (if I was stupid enough to take payment for a bagel with a barrel of oil, I WOULD have to return it if it turned out it was stolen. I should have known there was something fishy!). No amount of cryptographic cleverness can force society to treat it as current.
- ghostly_s 5y agoYou actually can be compelled to forfeit money paid to you if it is found to be stolen (in the US, anyway).
- ineedasername 5y agoI'm pretty sure cash falls into the "stolen goods" category, and you don't get to keep them even if you didn't know they were stolen. You'd have to give the bagel cash back just as much as the barrel of oil. (Well, in my jurisdiction. Source: family member is a lawyer)
- vintermann 5y agoTraditionally, you wouldn't have to, though - that's why they called it "currency", because it is "current". I believe it still works that way for bagel-level money in most parts of the world. If it's higher amounts, I'm not sure - you certainly have a lot of due diligence obligations, and if you didn't do them you certainly lose it (and you will be in trouble, too).
- ineedasername 5y agoThe roots of the word currency do not stem from your sense of "current", by which you seems to mean something like "immediate". It primarily comes from the Latin currens which means to run, or flow. It's monetary sense comes from that, as money can be thought of as flowing throughout the economic system. The temporal sense of "current" comes into play only as denoting something like "the present day medium of exchange" not "immediate". Bank notes and checks for example are both forms of currency but are not immediate. The immediacy of cash-- separate from its status as a currency-- does not confer it special rights. To use something less trivial than a bagel, think of a car. If the dealership is notified that it received stolen cash for a car, it now knows that it is in possession of stolen money. It cannot legally keep money it knows was stolen. The exchange it entered into with the thief was itself not a legal transaction. The cash goes back to the rightful owner, the dealership gets to fight it out with their insurance company to get its own money back.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoCash has serial numbers printed on it.
- Scoundreller 5y agoYou’d think Americans would better adopt those stupid stupid $1 coins (wow I hated getting 17 of those and a transit token for my $20 bill).