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The author of this article minsunnderstinds what fungibility means. ' Fungibility does not mean non-unique or non-traceable. Fungibility means that a given as

The author of this article minsunnderstinds what fungibility means. ' Fungibility does not mean non-unique or non-traceable. Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. For example, every $20 bill and every share of Apple stock has a serial number that uniquely identifies it, but that uniqueness is legally irrelevant. You broker has no obligation to give you a specific share of stock nor your bank a specific $20 bill. Financial securities are fungible. Bitcoin is fungible. == Edit: Commentators are confusing fungibility and traceability. They are very different concepts. Non Fungible Tokens are just as traceable as Bitcoin, but they are non-fungable. I wrote a detailed article about this [1] a few weeks ago if you want to gory details. [1] https://www.disruptingjapan.com/what-three-card-monte-can-teach-you-about-nfts/ https://www.disruptingjapan.com/what-three-card-monte-can-te...

mountainboy 5y ago
umm, no. just no. fungibility means that two units are interchangeable/equivalent. Legality doesn't enter into it. anything that makes unit A perceptibly different from unit B can cause humans to value unit A more less than B. Some units may be perceived as "better" than average and carry a premium. Others may be perceived as "bad" or "tainted" and trade at a discount. Such differences are generally considered undesirable in a money.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
No, it's not. It depends on who's asking. If I see that the satoshis you're trying to give to me were part of (e.g.) a drug transaction in the past, I might not feel comfortable accepting your money. The problem with Bitcoin is that I can do that taint analysis, because the entire transaction graph is public.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mw888 5y ago
Legally identical is a nonsense metric: if I own bitcoin I cannot sell because it has a tainted history then it is obviously not equivalent and not as valuable as bitcoin which can be. The fact that no broker cares about which instance of the stock or dollar you own but can track it anyways proves that those things are effectively fungible. In Bitcoin it is obviously not true that exchanges don’t care in the same way - plainly obvious from the source material you are responding to. When different bitcoin have different value by virtue of not being exchangeable at the largest liquidity pools, and your definition of fungible fails to capture that fact, you have the wrong definition.
- portent 5y ago
  The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$1=2$), NFTs are not fungible with NFTs (1NFT+1NFT=1NFT+1NFT).
  - astrange 5y ago
    You can clone an NFT by forking the blockchain it's on, or making another one with the same data. People who respect NFT ownership won't be able to tell without research which one is real.
    - halestock 5y ago
      If I make a counterfeit Picasso and sell it to someone who doesn't know any better, that doesn't mean the original is now fungible, it just means I duped someone.
      - astrange 5y ago
        Etherium _is_ a fork already; Etherium Classic is the original. So it's like collecting real life objects where the newer version is more valuable.
        halestock 5y ago
        Ha, well, I'd argue that the generalized version of what I said applies as well. Forking a currency changes nothing about the properties of the original currency because we're no longer talking about the original currency. That is not to say there aren't real world implications of that happening, but that's nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of a currency.
        nootropicat 5y ago
        Ethereum classic had 9 hard forks. How is that the original chain?
dav_Oz 5y ago
What about "tainted" bitcoins? Those [0] would take some effort to "wash". Because of serial numbering some dollar bills can be worth more than others; certainly there seems to be a 'market' for that.[1] So, in the end it is more like: every "satoshi" is intended to be fungible but through its transparent chain can offer additional information which can be used to discriminate against ... or who knows maybe in the future bitcoins from some special address or with a special tx history are worth more ... [0]https://whale-alert.io/transaction/bitcoin/77ad70fadfbbad5191c47c951469095ca845006f25fe9814f30f2853af367459 https://whale-alert.io/transaction/bitcoin/77ad70fadfbbad519... [1]https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills
lordofgibbons 5y ago
What does legally identical even mean in the context of Crypto? The government can raid your house if someone sends you dirty/darknet/terror money and you deposit it on Coinbase. Bitcoin is absolutely not Fungible.
sb057 5y ago
>Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. There are a number of bitcoin addresses that the United States has blacklisted. If you interact with them (including receiving bitcoin that once passed through those wallets at any point in the past) those assets are subject to seizure. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20211108 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Commentators are confusing fungibility and traceability. They are very different concepts. No, I think the commentators and the author of the article are making a valid point that you’re missing: They may be fungible if you ignore everything else about the Bitcoin ecosystem and focus only on the blockchain ledger, but you can’t divorce the Bitcoin balances from their history. As regulations mount and exchanges become more active in recovering stolen coins, the practical reality of Bitcoin will mean that they’re not entirely fungible depending on the history. I think many people in the comments are in such a rush to declare Bitcoin as fungible that they’re missing the point of the article.
- analog31 5y ago
  This is something I would worry about. If a particular piece of bitcoin becomes tainted because it's associated with dirty money (or whatever), and I receive it as a payment, will it become harder to spend or of less value? What if it goes onto some sort of blacklist? To use the recent parlance, can my money be "cancelled" by popular opinion?
  - labster 5y ago
    Yes, popular opinion can cancel you via forking the blockchain or software.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Yes, and this popular opinion is one of the exchanges and online wallets. Not necessarily the miners or nodes running the network.
  - chii 5y ago
    which kind of goes against the very philosophy of bitcoins in the first place, where there should not be centralized control of the currency. A blacklist of coins is a defacto centralized control.
    - analog31 5y ago
      On the other hand, the lack of centralized control means that each person can have their own philosophy of bitcoins. Literally every individual can have their own belief about what bitcoins are useful for. The only limitation is whether a particular philosophy makes sense in light of how bitcoins work and behave at any given moment.
garren 5y ago
Fungible simply means “interchangeable”, legality has nothing to do with it [0] (especially, it seems to me, in regards to a system that doesn’t seem explicitly subject to legal constraints like bitcoin.) One bitcoin is, in theory, interchangeable with any other without a loss of value. However, bitcoins with a dubious history of transactions can, and apparently are, being refused in some circumstances. Clearly some bitcoins have less utility, less value, than others. The traceability of a bitcoin leads to it possibly being rejected in some transactions, not because ant given bitcoin is (again, in theory) no different than any other, but because one bitcoin’s history may be tainted. The “blood diamond” analogy seems appropriate - such a diamond remains a diamond, and is technically no different from a comparable “clean” diamond, but reputable dealers and customers will avoid them. Effectively rendering these diamonds of less value than others. In theory bitcoins are fungible. In practice they are not. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible
- bb88 5y ago
  So when you accept BTC, how do you know if you'll be able to pass it on again? Is there a blood coin list? EDITED TO ADD: Here's something interesting about tainted coins. The commenter took out a Blockfi loan on coins he's had since 2020. The person he bought them from used BISQ. Then Blockfi recalled the loan immediately. https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/skxpr7/blockfi_horrible_loan_experience_fortune_lost/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/skxpr7/bloc...
  - wmf 5y ago
    You hire a company like Chainalysis to do risk analysis for you.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gingeropolous 5y ago
      yes because thats clearly how money should work.
ip26 5y ago
If 10% of $20 bills (by serial number) were not considered legal tender, then $20 bills would no longer be fungible. The ramifications are the important part. If 10% of bills are essentially fake money, you have to verify every bill you handle, adding significant friction.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  More than 20 years ago when I worked a retail job in college we did verify every bill >= $20. It was easy: a simple marker revealed if it was counterfeit, along with something that revealed watermarks etc. It wasn't much friction, it took a few seconds.
- halestock 5y ago
  Fungibility has nothing to do with dollar bills and everything to do with dollars. You can't make a withdrawal from a bank after two years and ask for the same dollar bills back that you deposited.
  - gingeropolous 5y ago
    but it does have to do with the dollar bills. The discussion centers on the technology as a currency and money. I think these things have bee separated in our general understanding of things, but in bitcoin they are melded into one. You control the outputs on the blockchain. The dollar bills on the blockchain. Sure, if you deposit your bitcoin at an exchange then yeah, you will get different bitcoin back, but the discussion isn't about that. It's about how the blockchain system works. And the way it works is that when you use bitcoin, and you own bitcoin, you do sorta ask for the same dollar bills back that you deposited. You don't really "deposit" them on the blockchain, but you kinda do. You deposit proof of ownership of a unit of account. Bitcoin calls it an output, a monero dev has coined the term e-note (or adopted the term i dunno) to try and better describe what it is. maybe you know all this i dunno. if you do, slap me around a bit. if you don't, i hope this makes sense.
    - halestock 5y ago
sgp_ 5y ago
I feel you're deliberately being pedantic. There's nothing legally dictating 1 pound of flour = any other 1 pound, but it is fungible, by the definition of them being indistinguishable. 1 NFT isn't the same as any other NFT. They're deliberately non-fungible. Specific Bitcoin outputs have histories associated with them. While you dismiss this as related to traceability (which is also true), it still stands that one output with a favorable history is preferable to an output that was known to be mined in North Korea. For these differences, as evidenced by the specific exchange action examples in the linked article, show that different output histories allow companies like Chainalysis, CipherTrace, TRM Labs, and Elliptic to add specific risk scores to outputs. Those with lower risk scores are worth more than those with higher risk scores. This is a breakdown in fungibility.
choward 5y ago
I was confused by the use of fungibility too. But if bitcoins can be traced they're no longer the same as every other Bitcoin. They're history makes them unique. Therefore they might be valued differently or because workers based on their history. For example, if someone robs a bank and they know the bank knows every serial number of every dollar bill they got then those dollars aren't worth as much as other dollars since there is risk with using them. So those dollars are non fungible with "clean" dollars. You're probably going to want then covered to clean dollars ASAP and it won't be a 1 to 1 exchange. Therefore it's the traceability that makes them non-fungible.
blueprint 5y ago
> legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. Well they're not because they're traceable. Your comment is so oddly conclusive yet so insubstantial
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. No, it means it is practically identical (that is, for any potential exchange partner in the marketplace, any unit of the thing is indistinguishable in trade from any other unit.) Being legally identical is a powerful aspect of practical equivalence for anything primarily exchanged in legal markets, but not the whole of it, and pretty much irrelevant to trade in illegal markets (e.g., items which are legally in the same category of contraband and undifferentiated in law may be very distinguishable and different to the people trading them.)
throwawaylinux 5y ago
As well as bitcoin not being practically fungible as others have pointed out, traceability is actually a big part of that. Bills are not traceable like bitcoin is. They have a serial number so they are identifiable, but only at the point you receive it so not very traceable and in practice impractical to identify in most cases. You can bet if the feds could feasibly blacklist bills that were stolen from a bank or held by a cartel or terrorist group, they would. But they can't. This non-traceability and difficulty to identify is what underpins their fungibility. Bitcoin's traceability is what causes its non-fungibility. Bills are not traceable like bitcoin is.
Proven 5y ago
Glyptodon 5y ago
If a party may look at two different bitcoins and say "I'd pay more for this one" or "I'll accept that one, but not this one" then it seems pretty clear they're not fungible.
numotion 5y ago
The author of the comment misunderstands that the sole purpose of crypto is uncensorable p2p digital cash. Legality is irrelevant...if you are brave enough to take your freedom and actually use crypto (no kyc). Fungibility is possible if the transaction history is hidden. Monero and Gold are fungible. Bitcoin is not fungible. ---- BTW also be aware of security risks if anyone can see your balance and transactions.
codeflo 5y ago
Fungibility is a practical concept, not a legal one. Examples like crude oil, or a certain grade of steel, or yes, cash are considered fungible because there’s a market where buyers usually don’t care about the specific item’s history. But that’s always a simplification that breaks down in edge cases, not a 100% mathematical truth. For example, I worked on a software project where the goal was to trace a perfectly mixable material through a production chain to analyze the impact of slight contaminations that were found after the fact. The material in question would be considered fungible in most markets, but not for this specific purpose.
imtringued 5y ago
>Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. The introduction is wrong but overall the problem is exactly what you have described. Some Bitcoins are not legally identical to other Bitcoins.
ComradePhil 5y ago
>Bitcoin is fungible. Not if your Bitcoin comes from a sanctioned entity, then it is equivalent to 0 BTC because you can't use it... which is exactly the point of the article.

mountainboy 5y ago

umm, no. just no. fungibility means that two units are interchangeable/equivalent. Legality doesn't enter into it. anything that makes unit A perceptibly different from unit B can cause humans to value unit A more less than B. Some units may be perceived as "better" than average and carry a premium. Others may be perceived as "bad" or "tainted" and trade at a discount. Such differences are generally considered undesirable in a money.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

No, it's not. It depends on who's asking. If I see that the satoshis you're trying to give to me were part of (e.g.) a drug transaction in the past, I might not feel comfortable accepting your money. The problem with Bitcoin is that I can do that taint analysis, because the entire transaction graph is public.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mw888 5y ago

Legally identical is a nonsense metric: if I own bitcoin I cannot sell because it has a tainted history then it is obviously not equivalent and not as valuable as bitcoin which can be. The fact that no broker cares about which instance of the stock or dollar you own but can track it anyways proves that those things are effectively fungible. In Bitcoin it is obviously not true that exchanges don’t care in the same way - plainly obvious from the source material you are responding to. When different bitcoin have different value by virtue of not being exchangeable at the largest liquidity pools, and your definition of fungible fails to capture that fact, you have the wrong definition.

portent 5y ago
The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$1=2$), NFTs are not fungible with NFTs (1NFT+1NFT=1NFT+1NFT).
- astrange 5y ago
  You can clone an NFT by forking the blockchain it's on, or making another one with the same data. People who respect NFT ownership won't be able to tell without research which one is real.
  - halestock 5y ago
    If I make a counterfeit Picasso and sell it to someone who doesn't know any better, that doesn't mean the original is now fungible, it just means I duped someone.
    - astrange 5y ago
      Etherium _is_ a fork already; Etherium Classic is the original. So it's like collecting real life objects where the newer version is more valuable.
      - halestock 5y ago
        Ha, well, I'd argue that the generalized version of what I said applies as well. Forking a currency changes nothing about the properties of the original currency because we're no longer talking about the original currency. That is not to say there aren't real world implications of that happening, but that's nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of a currency.
      - nootropicat 5y ago
        Ethereum classic had 9 hard forks. How is that the original chain?

dav_Oz 5y ago

What about "tainted" bitcoins? Those [0] would take some effort to "wash". Because of serial numbering some dollar bills can be worth more than others; certainly there seems to be a 'market' for that.[1] So, in the end it is more like: every "satoshi" is intended to be fungible but through its transparent chain can offer additional information which can be used to discriminate against ... or who knows maybe in the future bitcoins from some special address or with a special tx history are worth more ... [0]https://whale-alert.io/transaction/bitcoin/77ad70fadfbbad5191c47c951469095ca845006f25fe9814f30f2853af367459 https://whale-alert.io/transaction/bitcoin/77ad70fadfbbad519... [1]https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

lordofgibbons 5y ago

What does legally identical even mean in the context of Crypto? The government can raid your house if someone sends you dirty/darknet/terror money and you deposit it on Coinbase. Bitcoin is absolutely not Fungible.

sb057 5y ago

>Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. There are a number of bitcoin addresses that the United States has blacklisted. If you interact with them (including receiving bitcoin that once passed through those wallets at any point in the past) those assets are subject to seizure. https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20211108 https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/...

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Commentators are confusing fungibility and traceability. They are very different concepts. No, I think the commentators and the author of the article are making a valid point that you’re missing: They may be fungible if you ignore everything else about the Bitcoin ecosystem and focus only on the blockchain ledger, but you can’t divorce the Bitcoin balances from their history. As regulations mount and exchanges become more active in recovering stolen coins, the practical reality of Bitcoin will mean that they’re not entirely fungible depending on the history. I think many people in the comments are in such a rush to declare Bitcoin as fungible that they’re missing the point of the article.

analog31 5y ago
This is something I would worry about. If a particular piece of bitcoin becomes tainted because it's associated with dirty money (or whatever), and I receive it as a payment, will it become harder to spend or of less value? What if it goes onto some sort of blacklist? To use the recent parlance, can my money be "cancelled" by popular opinion?
- labster 5y ago
  Yes, popular opinion can cancel you via forking the blockchain or software.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Yes, and this popular opinion is one of the exchanges and online wallets. Not necessarily the miners or nodes running the network.
- chii 5y ago
  which kind of goes against the very philosophy of bitcoins in the first place, where there should not be centralized control of the currency. A blacklist of coins is a defacto centralized control.
  - analog31 5y ago
    On the other hand, the lack of centralized control means that each person can have their own philosophy of bitcoins. Literally every individual can have their own belief about what bitcoins are useful for. The only limitation is whether a particular philosophy makes sense in light of how bitcoins work and behave at any given moment.

garren 5y ago

Fungible simply means “interchangeable”, legality has nothing to do with it [0] (especially, it seems to me, in regards to a system that doesn’t seem explicitly subject to legal constraints like bitcoin.) One bitcoin is, in theory, interchangeable with any other without a loss of value. However, bitcoins with a dubious history of transactions can, and apparently are, being refused in some circumstances. Clearly some bitcoins have less utility, less value, than others. The traceability of a bitcoin leads to it possibly being rejected in some transactions, not because ant given bitcoin is (again, in theory) no different than any other, but because one bitcoin’s history may be tainted. The “blood diamond” analogy seems appropriate - such a diamond remains a diamond, and is technically no different from a comparable “clean” diamond, but reputable dealers and customers will avoid them. Effectively rendering these diamonds of less value than others. In theory bitcoins are fungible. In practice they are not. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fungible

bb88 5y ago
So when you accept BTC, how do you know if you'll be able to pass it on again? Is there a blood coin list? EDITED TO ADD: Here's something interesting about tainted coins. The commenter took out a Blockfi loan on coins he's had since 2020. The person he bought them from used BISQ. Then Blockfi recalled the loan immediately. https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/skxpr7/blockfi_horrible_loan_experience_fortune_lost/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/skxpr7/bloc...
- wmf 5y ago
  You hire a company like Chainalysis to do risk analysis for you.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gingeropolous 5y ago
    yes because thats clearly how money should work.

ip26 5y ago

If 10% of $20 bills (by serial number) were not considered legal tender, then $20 bills would no longer be fungible. The ramifications are the important part. If 10% of bills are essentially fake money, you have to verify every bill you handle, adding significant friction.

ineedasername 5y ago
More than 20 years ago when I worked a retail job in college we did verify every bill >= $20. It was easy: a simple marker revealed if it was counterfeit, along with something that revealed watermarks etc. It wasn't much friction, it took a few seconds.
halestock 5y ago
Fungibility has nothing to do with dollar bills and everything to do with dollars. You can't make a withdrawal from a bank after two years and ask for the same dollar bills back that you deposited.
- gingeropolous 5y ago
  but it does have to do with the dollar bills. The discussion centers on the technology as a currency and money. I think these things have bee separated in our general understanding of things, but in bitcoin they are melded into one. You control the outputs on the blockchain. The dollar bills on the blockchain. Sure, if you deposit your bitcoin at an exchange then yeah, you will get different bitcoin back, but the discussion isn't about that. It's about how the blockchain system works. And the way it works is that when you use bitcoin, and you own bitcoin, you do sorta ask for the same dollar bills back that you deposited. You don't really "deposit" them on the blockchain, but you kinda do. You deposit proof of ownership of a unit of account. Bitcoin calls it an output, a monero dev has coined the term e-note (or adopted the term i dunno) to try and better describe what it is. maybe you know all this i dunno. if you do, slap me around a bit. if you don't, i hope this makes sense.
  - halestock 5y ago

sgp_ 5y ago

I feel you're deliberately being pedantic. There's nothing legally dictating 1 pound of flour = any other 1 pound, but it is fungible, by the definition of them being indistinguishable. 1 NFT isn't the same as any other NFT. They're deliberately non-fungible. Specific Bitcoin outputs have histories associated with them. While you dismiss this as related to traceability (which is also true), it still stands that one output with a favorable history is preferable to an output that was known to be mined in North Korea. For these differences, as evidenced by the specific exchange action examples in the linked article, show that different output histories allow companies like Chainalysis, CipherTrace, TRM Labs, and Elliptic to add specific risk scores to outputs. Those with lower risk scores are worth more than those with higher risk scores. This is a breakdown in fungibility.

choward 5y ago

I was confused by the use of fungibility too. But if bitcoins can be traced they're no longer the same as every other Bitcoin. They're history makes them unique. Therefore they might be valued differently or because workers based on their history. For example, if someone robs a bank and they know the bank knows every serial number of every dollar bill they got then those dollars aren't worth as much as other dollars since there is risk with using them. So those dollars are non fungible with "clean" dollars. You're probably going to want then covered to clean dollars ASAP and it won't be a 1 to 1 exchange. Therefore it's the traceability that makes them non-fungible.

blueprint 5y ago

> legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. Well they're not because they're traceable. Your comment is so oddly conclusive yet so insubstantial

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. No, it means it is practically identical (that is, for any potential exchange partner in the marketplace, any unit of the thing is indistinguishable in trade from any other unit.) Being legally identical is a powerful aspect of practical equivalence for anything primarily exchanged in legal markets, but not the whole of it, and pretty much irrelevant to trade in illegal markets (e.g., items which are legally in the same category of contraband and undifferentiated in law may be very distinguishable and different to the people trading them.)

throwawaylinux 5y ago

As well as bitcoin not being practically fungible as others have pointed out, traceability is actually a big part of that. Bills are not traceable like bitcoin is. They have a serial number so they are identifiable, but only at the point you receive it so not very traceable and in practice impractical to identify in most cases. You can bet if the feds could feasibly blacklist bills that were stolen from a bank or held by a cartel or terrorist group, they would. But they can't. This non-traceability and difficulty to identify is what underpins their fungibility. Bitcoin's traceability is what causes its non-fungibility. Bills are not traceable like bitcoin is.

Proven 5y ago

Glyptodon 5y ago

If a party may look at two different bitcoins and say "I'd pay more for this one" or "I'll accept that one, but not this one" then it seems pretty clear they're not fungible.

numotion 5y ago

The author of the comment misunderstands that the sole purpose of crypto is uncensorable p2p digital cash. Legality is irrelevant...if you are brave enough to take your freedom and actually use crypto (no kyc). Fungibility is possible if the transaction history is hidden. Monero and Gold are fungible. Bitcoin is not fungible. ---- BTW also be aware of security risks if anyone can see your balance and transactions.

codeflo 5y ago

Fungibility is a practical concept, not a legal one. Examples like crude oil, or a certain grade of steel, or yes, cash are considered fungible because there’s a market where buyers usually don’t care about the specific item’s history. But that’s always a simplification that breaks down in edge cases, not a 100% mathematical truth. For example, I worked on a software project where the goal was to trace a perfectly mixable material through a production chain to analyze the impact of slight contaminations that were found after the fact. The material in question would be considered fungible in most markets, but not for this specific purpose.

imtringued 5y ago

>Fungibility means that a given asset is legally identical to all other instances of the same thing. The introduction is wrong but overall the problem is exactly what you have described. Some Bitcoins are not legally identical to other Bitcoins.

ComradePhil 5y ago

>Bitcoin is fungible. Not if your Bitcoin comes from a sanctioned entity, then it is equivalent to 0 BTC because you can't use it... which is exactly the point of the article.