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Comment by mw888 | Hacker News Reader

Legally identical is a nonsense metric: if I own bitcoin I cannot sell because it has a tainted history then it is obviously not equivalent and not as valuable as bitcoin which can be.

The fact that no broker cares about which instance of the stock or dollar you own but can track it anyways proves that those things are effectively fungible. In Bitcoin it is obviously not true that exchanges don’t care in the same way - plainly obvious from the source material you are responding to.

When different bitcoin have different value by virtue of not being exchangeable at the largest liquidity pools, and your definition of fungible fails to capture that fact, you have the wrong definition.

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Brokers do care about the specific stocks or dollars. There are a lot of anti money laundering laws and regulations that force due diligence in this respect. It seems like similar mechanisms are appearing in the crypto world as well.

The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$1=2$), NFTs are not fungible with NFTs (1NFT+1NFT=1NFT+1NFT).

You can clone an NFT by forking the blockchain it's on, or making another one with the same data. People who respect NFT ownership won't be able to tell without research which one is real.

If I make a counterfeit Picasso and sell it to someone who doesn't know any better, that doesn't mean the original is now fungible, it just means I duped someone.

Etherium _is_ a fork already; Etherium Classic is the original. So it's like collecting real life objects where the newer version is more valuable.

Ha, well, I'd argue that the generalized version of what I said applies as well. Forking a currency changes nothing about the properties of the original currency because we're no longer talking about the original currency. That is not to say there aren't real world implications of that happening, but that's nothing to do with the intrinsic properties of a currency.

Ethereum classic had 9 hard forks. How is that the original chain?

A NFT isn't art or currency. At most, it's a record of ownership. When two ownership records exists, the value of the original drop steeply when the copy is accepted widely-enough.

I don't disagree, but I think that's still orthogonal to the discussion and, considering NFTs are non-fungible by definition, it's moot anyway.

But let's pretend we're talking about cryptocurrency, which does claim to be fungible. Bitcoin forked and so now you have BTC and BCH. One is more accepted, and the other lost value. But regardless of the relationship between the two, each individual currency is still fungible because you can still exchange 1 BTC for 1 BTC. Fungibility is an intrinsic property of a single currency, it says nothing about it's relationship to other currencies or it's place in the economy.

Or just screenshot it.

You basically just explained why dollar bills are not perfectly fungible either. Nothing is truly mathematically fungible in the real world.

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