I DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN PAID REVIEWS OR PROMOTIONS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN APPROACHED BY SOMEONE ON TELEGRAM CLAIMING TO BE A PART OF THE CRYPTO TIPS TEAM, THEY ARE SCAMMERS!
Patreon:
Twitter:
Instagram:
LBRY:
LINKS FOR ADDITIONAL READING FOR THIS VIDEO & ALL INFO IN TEXT DOWN BELOW:
BTC Blacklisting and proximity:
OFAC Wants to Destroy Crypto Fungibility:
Let’s kick this one off with a helpful definition. Investopedia defines fungibility as: Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type.
Meaning that if Bitcoin is fungible, then you can trade one Bitcoin for one Bitcoin and it’s equal or one ether for one ether, or one dragon coin for one dragon coin.
To reference a tried and true fungible payment mechanism, look no further than those square, colorful pieces of paper you store in your wallet. Cash is extremely fungible, meaning that the transaction history of cash is very difficult to trace. Blockchain technology is a beautiful invention and it brings with it the ability to disrupt a host of different industries that really need it. But the fact is, the transparency afforded to us through the use of a public blockchain for value transfer is a double edged sword.
Transparency demands honesty but it can also implicate innocent people if they are some how associated with a coin that at one point was say stolen in a hack or involved in some other type of incriminating situation.
That really is what fungibility is about especially for this cryptocurrency space, it’s about the history of the coin and how that history can haunt that coin and whoever holds it, regardless if that person had anything to do with the history of that coin.
As this space continues, there are increasing numbers of entities interested in knowing which coins are going where and how many people they can identify just through transaction history and patterns.
There are all sorts of excuses for this type of intrusion of privacy, of course the big governments are fast to claim terrorism as the ultimate boogie man (which by the way, the transparency of public blockchains are enough so that the vast majority of criminals prefer to use cash over crypto.)
For those of you who aren’t as concerned about keeping your personal transaction history private, here’s a very possible scenario that will help you value fungibility.Let’s say you log onto your favorite exchange, maybe it’s one which you went through the KYC requirements so they know exactly who you are and where you live, and you purchase some cryptocurrencies with your completely legitimate cryptocurrency. But unbeknownst to you, and that exchange, you just purchased that coin from a hacker who was using that exchange to wash his very freshly acquired loot. Then you take that coin and deposit it onto a different exchange to get a hold of a different cryptocurrency. Except this time word is getting out that a hack has just happened and the hacker has been using different accounts on different exchanges to wash the funds and to obfuscate the history of those coins. Next thing you know, your account is flagged and now you’ve got some explaining to do.
This is where privacy coins and privacy layers for networks like BTC and ETH come into play.
This issue isn’t anything new, it’s something that most major cryptocurrencies recognize as something they need to address. Bitcoin has been working on implementing Schnorr signatures as well as the potential for the Lightning Network to offer some sort of privacy protection. Ethereum now has the AZTEC privacy layer as well as the Incognito side chain.
But the real winners here will be privacy coins. Even in this field, not all privacy coins are created equal, most require you to opt in to the privacy features either by using a special wallet, or by paying for their coin mixing services often provided by their master node network. I’m not usually one to name names, but I will say that Monero is the first privacy coin to hit the crypto market and with its relative longstanding history and the fact that the privacy features are its default setting, I think it’s a good example of a privacy coin if you’re going to start comparing privacy coins.