What do you think about the fungibility of a bitcoin?
Yes, somebody suggested that I should end my my talk with Liberté égalité a fungibility
That's an insider joke for us bitcoiners
Fungibility so first of all does anybody okay? Who does not understand the word fungibility or hasn't is not familiar with it great?
Let's talk about fungibility
So one Euro is one Euro is one Euro if you receive a Euro it
Doesn't matter where it came from it doesn't matter if two people before you it was stolen
It doesn't matter if two people before you it was robbed from a bank
It's a euro upon presentation that Euro is the same as every other Euro
And no one can say I'll take this euro
but I won't take that euro and and that is not simply a matter of
Practice that is a matter of law, and this law was settled in the 16th century
Where someone said actually?
That's my Euro
It was stolen
And they took someone to court
Who was not the person who stole it who was person who received it several times later and said that is stolen property
Okay, wasn't a euro. It was a franc or something like that. I think it was a pound sterling actually
And it was taken to court and the Court said you can't do that
So money is the one type of property that cannot be stolen and then recovered by the original owner if you steal money
Right you can't say that's my money
Give it back to people later. You can say it to the person who stole it
But you can't just walk into a shop and say I'm gonna. Sue you because you have the money that was stolen from me
That's fungibility
The reason we have fungibility in the currency is very very simple
otherwise it wouldn't work if
every time you received a euro you had to open a list or database and say okay serial number 1 3 1 3 3
7 7 - is that a good euro or a bad euro is it a medium here all the kind of naughty Euro?
Is it a bit cocaine eeeeh?
Is it a bit terrorist II?
Because then it's not one hero
it's
0.72 euros
it's
0.76 euros now this one's a bit too. Cocaine is 0.53 euros in value, right?
Oh this one was touched by Elton John it's 1.6. Euros
We don't accept that as a model for using currency and the reason we don't accept it is because it wouldn't work if you had
To check the provenance of every system of money that you receive
You couldn't make currency work and the reason you couldn't make it work is not
Just because you would have to track a database that had to be perfect and always updated with every coin in it
But the most important thing is that no euro would be worth one hero
Every Euro would be worth a different value weighted by how liquid it is how circular Bowl it is
Whether you could use it, right?
So if you can use it but some places and not use it other places
Automatically its value drops and now you have to keep track of what the value of one hero is in here. Oh, right?
That's fungibility. It's the
understanding by law understanding by practice and
Technological fact that every unit of currency is indistinguishable
Or is treated as indistinguishable from every other unit of currency
Bitcoin is fungible ish
Somewhat fungible in Bitcoin you can trace the provenance of every coin by practice
By custom. We don't do that
We are beginning to see some companies do that that is a problem if you go to
Bitstamp
coinbase
Zappo, and you say here's my bitcoin, and they say well three bitcoins ago
Or three transactions ago this came from Bitfenix
And we're gonna freeze your account
You have a problem right? So that's fungibility being destroyed right now in Bitcoin however at the same time
We're seeing a lot of technologies being developed to improve function t. Because fungibility also has to do with privacy and
Anonymity which are really important characteristics that we're trying to strengthen and at the same time preserve
within bitcoin and that means ensuring that
Transactions are private that you don't know who is who in a transaction that you don't know what value is being transmitted
There's a number of technologies being developed for that which make bitcoin
extremely private
Where you can't even see the value of the transactions being made you can't tell who is the Sender and who is the recipient?
You can't tell how much money is being paid and it?
really fixes
Fungibility because you simply can't track coins from one to another
and
This is the point where most people go, but what about criminals, but what about drug dealers, but what about?
Terrorists aren't they going to use this to do that?
Yes
They're going to use this to do that and if you didn't do it in bitcoin
They're going to use another cryptocurrency that already does that there's half a dozen
Available that already do that. And if you say you can't use those I'll invent two. I'll write one this weekend this weekend that can do that
The bottom line is that criminals will use technology even if it's illegal
Incredible idea and so
banning Technology
Only effects the people who aren't criminals
Is this me this is Wild Philosophy I know
So you can't actually ban technology?
especially open-source technology because the only people who will be affected by the ban are the innocent and
the idiots
The people who couldn't figure out how to use the technology that actually allowed them to hide the sources of their money
So fungibility is something we're fixing in bitcoin because what it does is
It helps everybody
the innocent
the well-meaning the people who pay taxes and want to educate their children and feed their children and buy homes and cars and
operate in society protect their privacy from predators from corporations from
Tyrannical governments from Oppressive governments, and so we need to do privacy for them
and criminals will also use it that's my answer for fungibility. Thank you so much. That was a good last question. It's been a pleasure
Thank you, everyone