Or you might get arrested at the border because your bills have traces of drugs on them. Cash is not fungible. Cash can be traced by SN therefore not fungible. See how rediculous this FUD is when your really logic the same criteria to cash. Under this criteria cash is non fungible but most people consider cash fungible. These theoretical outlier cases are FUD.
Discussion
The difference is that serials aren't generally tracked in each transaction which allows gaps to exist.
Yes one is a physical good and one is a digital “good” so they have different characteristics however a sat is interchangeable for another sat this is what fungibility is. They are equal. Traceability is a person liability not a bitcoin liability. Just like cash be traced to illegal activity is a personal liability not a liability to cash.
Ignoring ordinals and the fact that some sats are apparently more equal than others, there is a huge difference between serialization and a totally open ledger of transaction history. Banks can see entry and exit points, but Chainalysis can watch the actual flow from wallet to wallet and track the exact trajectory of each coin easily. This is a huge amount of data, which means you’re not only forever associated with everyone you ever transact with, you’re associated with everyone they transact with too, and that data never goes away. Even if you don’t care about Chainalysis being able to monitor you, if you have a savings account then sending someone Bitcoin from it means revealing to them exactly how much BTC you own, and lets them watch all of your on chain activity forever after.
This is not cash. Even accounting for serialization, I never have to spend a second thinking about the consequences to my financial privacy when I hand somebody $5. I will never know if my $5 bill has been used for drugs or strippers or crime, and I can rest assured that if I choose to use it for those things, or donate it to my church, nobody will ever be able to track it back to me 10 years from now.
All sats are equal value. Same as pure gold. If someone values the imbedded data in a sat and if willing to pay a premium price that is like someone willing to pay a premium for a gold coin from a certain mint they value that imbedded data in the coin. The gold in self the value is the same.
Chainanalysis is a concern I am well aware of it. However the solution already exist. If you buy you sats p2p your identity is not tied to your UTXOs. Secondly if you use tools like whirlpool in breaks links for past transactions to future transactions. I don’t care if someone sees a UTXO on chain if they cannot associate it with me. That is privacy. Like ticker tape on the stock exchange. You see the transactions but not the identity.
I think maybe the breakdown is between what happens in reality vs what the code says. In the code yes a sat is a sat, and generally this is how most people look at it. However in reality chain analysis makes it a lot easier to follow sats than physical dollars in spite of the literal serial number printed on them which if used would make the dollar not fungible.
It is possibble to "wash" your sats so to speak, but this activity is also visible (it just detaches you from that activity [hopefully]). Laundering money is also something that can get you in a bit of trouble if you become interesting to government. While I'm not saying we should follow laws just for the sake of following laws, I do think maintaining a certain level of plausible deniability is important, especially if you think that your activities might be interesting to the state for one reason or another (taxes, illegal activity, whatever).
"traceability" is built into bitcoin. It requires effort with physical assets. With current technology that effort requirement is too great for it to be useful with monero.
Why does our grandma or non-techy friends need to know how to have perfect opsec to reasonably transact privately with bitcoin? Do we really expect them to know every intricacy like us? Why not make that as easy and foolproof as possible?
I'm sure a vast majority of bitcoiners don't even know how to do this properly. And even those of us who do have to actively maintain that privacy going into the future. One false move and it is all undone. It is a valiant first attempt but just bad design in that aspect imo.
Do we really think Granny is gonna adopt XMR?
Yea, it is funny, but many subscribe to hyperbitcoinization global adoption prophecy. Are non-techy (AKA most of the world) left out of that?
It would be more likely if the image wasn't only one of criminality. There are valid reasons to prefer privacy, and it should be opt out rather than opt in.
Why not?? Age is not a barrier, the important thing is the desire to learn, a wallet with a btc qr is the same as a wallet with a the xmr qr, the difference is that to get the same privacy in btc you have to do a mix with a special wallet, pay some fees and the scenario is complicated, in monero it is intrinsic.
The difference is every time I make a cash transaction it is not broadcast and publicly available to the world along with my historical tx graph, remaining balance, and potentially my net worth. (Bitcoin worst case is worse than cash)
You can't trace the full history of cash. Even with SNs, all you can do is know the end points - where it was withdrawn and where it was deposited/confiscated. All the hops and p2p actors in between are not available.
