1. What is Fungibility? Something to do with mushrooms?
Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. That is, it is the property of essences or goods which are "capable of being substituted in place of one another." Fungibility - Wikipedia
Nothing about Mushrooms here, essentially a crypto-currency that is "fungible" means that every single coin should always remain equal in value to all other coins, this is a very key part of having a proper financial system. It ensures a properly working financial system that cannot be tampered with, altered or taken control of due to the nature of keeping everyones money equal. Fungibility also helps create a fair playing ground where privacy is alot less likely to be invaded due to the sheer size of the data pool.
What does this mean for you though? Why should you care about a crypto currency, being fungible?
Without fungibility, you would be left with a currency that is only valuable as the governing body says it is, once the governing body can identify one coin from another coin, the value of said coin is headed into the ground. From this point blacklists can be made, and ultimately the end users can be tracked via their currency choice, which is yet another breach of privacy. So keep that in mind when you are searching for your next investment. If it's not fungible, it's not flexible.
2. What are you going on about? Aren't all coins fungible?
Fungibility is key to the success of a long term privacy centric coin such as #PIVX (@pivx), thus the need to keep it at the very forefront of everything that happens within the PIVX community. We are building a coin for our children, and in order to make it last long enough and thrive into a real decentralized economy, fungibility has to remain a pillar.
Fun fact; most crypto currencies are in fact not fungible at all, Bitcoin barely can call itself fungible, if at all. The only TRUELY fungible coins right now from a privacy aspect are Monero, Shadowcash & soon to be Safecoin from MAID. While PIVX is teetering on the edge of fungibility in my own opinion, we won't be 100% fungible until the new protocol is implemented and we can further upgrade our anon capabilities beyond simple coinjoin tech.
Just wanted to drop some knowledge on the world this morning, hope you learned something new today! Steem on Steemers!
Hmm, isn't Z-cash (ZEC) supposed to have similar aspect of privacy to that of Monero?
Negative; It isn't because not all transactions are mixed. Same with zcoin. Although, Zcoin will probably change to mix transactions all the time.
PIVX: Now fully fungible ;)