In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously

Re:In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail ser... by ALittleLight on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @03:02AM (#30438781)

Cash is kind of fungible, but not really. Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection.

In common practice it's fungible in the sense that one twenty dollar bill is as good as another. In edge cases though it's not quite fully fungible.

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Re:In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail ser... by runeks on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @05:22AM (#30439654)

> Every bill has a serial number, so every bill is unique. This is what it means when money is "marked" in a police investigation, they give bills with known serial numbers to bad actors in a criminal enterprise and then recover the bills at the other end of the enterprise proving the connection.

This has nothing to do with fungibility unless a bill’s serial number affects either your ownership of the bill or whether the bill will be accepted as payment.

Fungibility is related to being indistinguishable for the purpose of economic transactions, not being physically indistinguishable.

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