Money fungibility has a lot of valuable properties. I want to talk about one silly idea I thought about. What if money wasn't fungible.
I was reading an article about patent trolls today on hacker news. It mentioned naming and shaming these patent trolls, but what if money wasn't fungible, what if we had pihole for money, with blacklists, white lists, and overrides.
What if tomorrow I could grab a list and say, I won't accept money from, or purchase from a business who accepted money from a particular person (or list of people)....effectively cutting them out of society at least....somewhat. if enough people said, I won't accept the dollars that the trolls used, then businesses would have to decide, are there enough people who will accept the money, or will they end up with useless dollars and eventually have to block them out as well.
While it can be fun to think of these ideas I am actually really glad we have fungible money. This example can be extended in lots of ways, and can really make a mess of things. What if you accidentally let it slip you voted for a particular law, and enough people didn't like the law. Could the above happened to you, etc.
Phew, I'm glad cash is fungible.....
This ignores credit cards, or other forms of money that we currently use. I wonder if anyone has built these kind of tools for CC payment processing.....probably not the cc companies, but they prob have lists of some sorts, though it's in their best interest for everyone to spend $$ because they capture value on every transaction.
*To be fair, that doesn't mean some of these things can't be done with fungible money, it would likely just be at a small scale, or would require considerably effort and is just not even a little realistic.
