Sunday, August 4, 2019

Perfecting NANO: fungibility

Fungibility

Sending 1 "tainted" Nano to Binance hot wallet would "wash" it by making it meld with all other coins in the wallet. Same as Bitcoin. However, up to the point of sending, that 1 Nano had a history which can be used by an exchange or any other entity to treat it differently which is the matter that defines fungibility.

When you pick up a dollar bill on the street, you have no idea where it went before. That bill is fungible.

When you pick up any cryptocoin other than Monero and it's clones, and move it to your wallet, with that coin (technically, with that UTXO) you have it's complete history: complete history of movement from one wallet to another, from the moment it was mined, to the end of the world (or a coin burning event). Even if coins aren't yours, you can still track their movement. Nano bounds to this rule as well as 99.9% all other coins.


NANO had solved the problem of consensus (DAG), the problem of PoW (making it completely distributed), and the problem of distribution. NANO had also solved the problem of coin creation, by (metaphorically speaking) closing the Chamber of Guf, and not allowing any new coins/souls to be created.

On the other hand, Monero (XMR) had solved the problem of practical fungibility, at the cost of complexity and practical scalability problems. Non-mining nodes aren't incentivized to waste bandwidth, disk space, and CPU power to decrypt blocks for third parties. Bandwidth use and processing power would impose a great cost on nodes. Using remote nodes breaks some of the privacy. It's not easy to use Monero for quick purchases in close succession. It's impossible to "stream money" using Monero. And it's blockchain always grows. There's no UTXO set, no possibility of storing just the UTXOs instead of whole chain.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network is extremely complex and requires paying on-chain fees for opening and closing of channels. The channels themselves are volatile, unstable, and require trusting "watchtowers" not to lose balance. As Bitcoin's usage grows, fees will skyrocket and make using it impossible.


Therefore, making NANO fungible, I think, would be the most important thing in history of money. Because we will finally have actual digital cash, where each transaction is immediate, final and irreversible, scalable to the entire world.


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