The Bitcoin Flaw: Monero Rising The Bitcoin Flaw: Monero Rising
By Izzy Otomakan
cryptoizzy.blogspot.ca
I recognize the irony that barely a few months after I shared The Power of Money: A Case for Bitcoin I am now releasing this piece - critical of Bitcoin. I wrote TPOM largely because I was fed up with people and institutions claiming Bitcoin was a fraud, ponzi scheme or bubble. It is none of those things. It is however, in a critical respect, over.
Bitcoin has been beaten .
We don’t need to wait any longer for further evidence of this fact. There is sufficient evidence now. At this point, what we see playing out is largely pantomime - as governors of the status quo introduce more mechanisms to increasingly neuter Bitcoin and enforce control over it – whether the general public is aware of it or not. Bitcoin has been compromised as the standard bearer for cryptocurrencies, and the wound is mortal.
I recognize this may sound outlandish, so please allow me to explain.
No matter what anyone may try to convince you of, the single most historic purpose of blockchain hasn’t to do with smart-contracts or disruption of the wire-transfer industry. Those are elements of secondary importance at best – and in proportional value to the larger purpose, pale by comparison. The historic purpose of Bitcoin is that it strives to be the highest quality money , and as such enables modern society to peacefully and effectively throw off the shackles of a corrupted system of unsound money that poisons everything it touches.
I spent time in The Power of Money discussing the 3 elements that are required for something to be successfully used as money. These may have been familiar to many already exposed to modern academia’s core economics curriculum. But this is where I went wrong. There are other rules necessary for ‘sound money’ besides those three. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before I was informed of my oversight by several in the Monero community . I had missed a critical element that contributes to something’s ‘moneyness’ and this makes all the difference. Whether it was intuition, luck, serendipity or some combination that I included an addendum which discussed a cryptocurrency which contains this feature I don’t know – I’m just glad that I mentioned it.
This 4th attribute of sound money is fungibility, and is an aspect that while subtle enough to escape notice (as it did with me), is also critical to determining whether a money is ‘sound’ or not. The repercussions for money not being fungible are significant, despite potentially being delayed for a time. But first, a definition:
Fungibility is a feature of money which declares that any transactional unit of the money is entirely indistinguishable from any other transactional unit of the money.
This has never really been a problem when using physical things like gold as money. After all, gold can always be melted down, and carries no recoverable history in itself to tell you where it’s been or who has held it.
But what if I could tell you with 100% certainty that a particular gold piece was kept by Napoleon Bonaparte as a good luck charm? That gold piece would surely be worth far more than the ‘average other’ gold piece that had no such impressive history. In a similar vein, what if I told you that another particular gold piece was used to launder drug money across the U.S.-Mexican border? Once the novelty of its association wore off, you might realize that because that gold was used in committing a crime, government officials could seize it at any time. You might in this case value it lower than an otherwise unburdened gold piece.
What these two examples show is that if a unit of money has an identifiable history associated with it, it can be 'different' from other units that don't share that history. As such, different units of a single money type may have significantly
