Oddbean new post about login | logout If all sats have equal value, would you willingly switch your current onchain sats for sats obtained through mixers, and then try to deposit the new sats at a reputable centralized exchange? If they had the same value - if they were truly fungible - then it wouldn't matter, and indeed, nobody would even be able to tell that this operation had been performed. All sats *should* have equal value, but because Bitcoin privacy is dodgy at best (and yes, I am aware of all the workarounds and employ them myself), they don't - in every situation, but at present only in certain ways will that become a problem (most notably with CEX, which are bound to obey the law, which is employed to maintain pervasive financial surveillance of everyone, with no regard for the presumption of innocence). Simply put, the pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin is not enough to enable fungibility. All sats have a history, if you try to erase their history, that becomes their new history. Now if you ask me if that should matter - no, it shouldn't (but makes for a clumsy solution for financial privacy). But it does, and it is a weak point, and being a weak point it is being leveraged by entities hostile to freedom and self-sovereignty, and it will probably get worse before it gets better.
Mixing sats doesn’t change the value of the sats. It changes the privacy of the Bitcoiner himself.
The first step in understanding the Austrian concept is to realize that value is entirely subjective, rather than something objective. Value, therefore, is something that each individual person weighs on a purely private, not a public, set of scales. (from https://mises.org/library/introduction-value-theory) Not sure if you agree with this view? Probably not? Bitcoiners generally do. I do as well. Other people value tainted sats differently. If they all had the same value, I couldn't write a program to flag certain utxos. And yet this is trivial to do. Because they are not fungible, and thus are valued differently. Sats have no intrinsic value. No other things does, at least if you buy (heh) Austrian Economics. This is why certain coins are set to be delisted (by government coercion in the background, no doubt) - since each unit is really like every other unit due to inbuilt cryptography, the government's solution is to foolishly try to ban the tool. With Bitcoin, no need - it's transparent (thus not fungible). They insist in attempting to outlaw mixing techniques (you can still do them, but good luck using sats from such txs in the aboveground economy, if they push this nonsense far enough.
True. You’re free to subjectively value one Apple Share more than all the other Apple Shares, no matter how idiotic that may be.
Indeed. Would you say USD in a bank account is fungible? I am of the opinion that the answer is no, because of the permissioned nature of that system, but also because of the lack of privacy and anonymity. As it exists today, I think the same is true of sats. Of course, unlike the above, Bitcoin is permissionless (i.e, one is not hostage to a third party when it comes to sending or receiving) .. but the transparency really screws the privacy and anonymity up. And that's what in turn makes sats be valued differently than other sats by some/many people. Powerful people with a dildonic desire to dominate and control others. It's all fun and games until one wants to pay for a very expensive item (car, house, etc) and the act of obfuscation (coinjoin, etc) comes up. Then, because the system is transparent by default, any attempts at gaining privacy are seen as suspect. Again, this is why in Bitcoin you see efforts to marginalize coinjoins, mixers, etc, whereas with Monero it's the asset itself that's under attack (delistings) - precisely because no useful distinction can be made, and therefore they cannot censor what they don't see; so they go for an outright ban. And yes, in either case we can (and arguably should) tell them where to shove it and keep coinjoining and (at least in my case) using Monero. As you can probably tell, I have zero issues with any attempt to gain privacy and preserving anonymity. Those can come with challenges (bad people do exist), but I see the collateral damage of having everything tracked as much more impactul. And look, it's not like I'm bashing BTC here. But if it is to improve, it is helpful to acknowledge where the weak points are. And to me, as a regular user of crypto for many years, it's glaringly obvious that privacy-wise, Bitcoin is a bit of a nightmare. And the situation as it is now constantly pushes towards more control, even if the network ispermissionless, because the control freaks have grown used to doing blockchain surveillance en mass, without warrants, at their leisure. Add to that the fact that all the transparency creates myriad ways to discriminate based on many different attributes. It is precisely that which erodes fungibility. X(anon) transfered Y to Z(anon) - not much chance to discriminate there. Like physical cash, except it does leave an encrypted trail behind, which while not as good as no trail, at least when it comes to privacy, seems much better than a completely transparent and eternal trail. Anyway my man, perhaps we will continue to disagree and that is fine, it was a good back and forth. In the end I can assure you that we both want Bitcoin to succeed no matter what else.