How it feels being a #Monero bro warning other communities about fungibility during a bull run:
What is fungibility? And why BTC, ETH, XRP, USDT, USDC, BNB, ADA, SOL and ZEC holders should care?
Look at these two "crypto wallets" below.
One shows the amount, the sender, the receiver, and a public history. The other reveals almost nothing. It is the difference between digital cash and digital financial surveillance tool.
On a transparent blockchain, every coin carries a record of where it has been. If those coins passed through an exchange, a mixer, a hack, a sanctioned address, or a flagged wallet, that story does not stay in the past. It arrives with the payment. When you accept the coin from a transparent blockchain, you also accept its entire financial history. That is what people mean by the word "fungibility", even if the word sounds academic.
• Fungible money is interchangeable.
• One unit is as good as another.
• E.g. 1 ounce of Gold always equals 1 ounce of Gold.
A shopkeeper does not ask whether your $10 note was used in a crime last year. It is just ten dollars.
If some coins are treated as clean and others as tainted, they are no longer the same money. They have different values, different risks, and different risks of being frozen or refused. Transparent blockchains make that possible because the open ledger never forgets and remembers every single transaction made.
Blacklists, "tainted history," and frozen funds are not bugs in that model, they are the main features. An innocent law abiding receiver can still inherit a problem they did not create as a result. Monero is designed so the coin has no memory of the sender.
• The amount is hidden.
• The path is hidden.
• 1 XMR is always equal to 1 XMR.
That is much closer to how real cash works: You receive money, not a dossier. This matters most for people who are NOT doing anything wrong!
"If you accept a coin from a transparent blockchain, you also accept their entire life history. Monero has no memory of the sender. That's how money should work. It's the squeaky clean people who need privacy most." - Dr. Daniel Kim
Ironically, Adam Back makes the fungibility problem obvious in this clip. After last month's ~4000 BTC inflation bug on Liquid Network (September 6, 2026), he talks about using the full force of the law against the hacker’s wallet address which only works if those coins can be identified, followed, and treated as different from every other bitcoin.
If the fungibility problem still is not clear, Andreas Antonopoulos explains it more plainly here:
Another great video presentation comparing Bitcoin's open public ledger vs Monero's fungibility to really get this point across about the dangers of transparent blockchains:
"We already see evidence of basically 'Virgin Bitcoins' (newly mined BTC with no previous financial records) being sold for higher prices than used Bitcoins… The buyer doesn't know what the history of the Bitcoin is. It's a fatal flaw." - Dr. Daniel Kim
One shows the amount, the sender, the receiver, and a public history. The other reveals almost nothing. It is the difference between digital cash and digital financial surveillance tool.
On a transparent blockchain, every coin carries a record of where it has been. If those coins passed through an exchange, a mixer, a hack, a sanctioned address, or a flagged wallet, that story does not stay in the past. It arrives with the payment. When you accept the coin from a transparent blockchain, you also accept its entire financial history. That is what people mean by the word "fungibility", even if the word sounds academic.
• Fungible money is interchangeable.
• One unit is as good as another.
• E.g. 1 ounce of Gold always equals 1 ounce of Gold.
A shopkeeper does not ask whether your $10 note was used in a crime last year. It is just ten dollars.
If some coins are treated as clean and others as tainted, they are no longer the same money. They have different values, different risks, and different risks of being frozen or refused. Transparent blockchains make that possible because the open ledger never forgets and remembers every single transaction made.
Blacklists, "tainted history," and frozen funds are not bugs in that model, they are the main features. An innocent law abiding receiver can still inherit a problem they did not create as a result. Monero is designed so the coin has no memory of the sender.
• The amount is hidden.
• The path is hidden.
• 1 XMR is always equal to 1 XMR.
That is much closer to how real cash works: You receive money, not a dossier. This matters most for people who are NOT doing anything wrong!
"If you accept a coin from a transparent blockchain, you also accept their entire life history. Monero has no memory of the sender. That's how money should work. It's the squeaky clean people who need privacy most." - Dr. Daniel Kim
Ironically, Adam Back makes the fungibility problem obvious in this clip. After last month's ~4000 BTC inflation bug on Liquid Network (September 6, 2026), he talks about using the full force of the law against the hacker’s wallet address which only works if those coins can be identified, followed, and treated as different from every other bitcoin.
If the fungibility problem still is not clear, Andreas Antonopoulos explains it more plainly here:
Another great video presentation comparing Bitcoin's open public ledger vs Monero's fungibility to really get this point across about the dangers of transparent blockchains:
"We already see evidence of basically 'Virgin Bitcoins' (newly mined BTC with no previous financial records) being sold for higher prices than used Bitcoins… The buyer doesn't know what the history of the Bitcoin is. It's a fatal flaw." - Dr. Daniel Kim
