We Epic folk don’t talk too much about the fungibility advantage. It’s the wallflower of the essential quartet – privacy, scalability, simplicity and fungibility. For most of us, privacy is the sexy one.
I could corral a hundred people in a room, and maybe half a person could give me a proper definition of fungi-whatsit.
It helps to think of fungibility as the non-discrimination principle for currencies. A currency is fungible when every single unit is indistinguishable from any other unit. This is crucial – no currency is truly trustworthy otherwise. Nobody wants their particular units of currency singled out to be confiscated.
This is one of the primary advantages of electronic fiat currencies. As they are indistinguishable from each other, and are reckoned only as part of a mass rather than as individual units, specific currency units cannot be tracked. It is also one advantage that Epic Cash has over BTC. Unlike Epic with its totally anonymised transactions, the spending history of BTC can be traced, so different coins can be tainted by the company they have kept – guilt by association, if you like. This should be as fallacious in a financial system as it is in an argument, but we don’t live in a fair world.
The world may not be fair, but sometimes there is a kind of rough poetic justice. The analysis that follows (hat-tip to Gonzalo Lira) illustrates this.
Lira, aka Coach Red Pill, is a Chilean journalist. For the last four years, he has been living in Ukraine, documenting the corruption of the Western-backed puppet government and their Nazi enforcers. Please note that this is not a judgement on whether the recent invasion of Ukraine was justified – it is just a well-documented statement of fact.
As we know, Western governments have tried to break the Russian economy by imposing sanctions, including expulsion from the SWIFT payment system, and effectively outlawing Russian use of the euro and dollar. The sanctions are largely failing, but that’s not the topic at hand. What is important is how, with this strategy, the positively moronic European Union is cutting its own throat, and that of its monstrous progeny, the euro.
Lira’s argument is this: the EU still needs to buy Russian gas (and a host of other products, but we will come to those), yet it has removed any incentive for the Russian government to accept euros. If it can’t spend them, why should it take them?
The Russian government announced that all gas had to be paid for in rubles. Purchasing nations had to open deposit euros in Gazprom Bank, the only Russian bank still connected to SWIFT. Gazprom would exchange these into rubles, and hey presto the magic spigots would open.
Predictably the EU leaders, with their overweening arrogance and intellectual limitations, hadn’t seen this coming. There was a lot of squawking. There was a lot of lecturing the public about how they should stop showering and heating their homes. Yet one by one they are coming to heel. They have to – with global oil markets as tight as ever in living memory, they have exhausted every possibility of sourcing their gas and oil elsewhere. Even their dim little brains have grasped this – albeit too late.
What they may not have understood – yet – is the huge threat to the status of the euro from this development. This is not referring to its value, although that is melting like a fondue in the Alpine sun. This is about the fungibility of the euro.
The EU has just made its currency hostage to Gazprom, by giving it the monopoly of the euro/ruble trade. As the EU has effectively outlawed the euro/ruble exchange pair in Europe, the only means of exchange is via Gazprom. There is nothing to stop Gazprom yanking the separate European economies on a string by varying the exchange rate at whim. Hungary or Serbia may get a very friendly rate – say, 85 rubles to the euro. Poland or Germany may get a very hostile one – 65 rubles or even less. The fact that this spells economic disaster for the less-favoured states is one thing. Beyond this, it will be the end of euro fungibility. The euros of one country will be more valuable than those of other countries.
This hasn’t happened – yet. But the likelihood is looking strong. What’s worse for Europe, this is just the beginning. Rosneft has already indicated that it intends to shift to payments in rubles for oil. All other purchases of key metals, minerals and agriculture products are bound to follow suit. The Russian government can break the credibility of the eurozone any time they choose – simply by acting on the friendly/unfriendly country list that they have already compiled.
Geopolitics is another topic that Epic folk don’t talk much about. This isn’t a criticism – there is too much else to occupy us. Yet it behoves us to keep abreast of events, as it will be geopolitical trends that will provide the cracks in the façade of the status quo that we can slip through, on the rocky path to mass adoption. Success isn’t just about right action, but about the right action at the right time. People, being basically lazy, won’t shift to Epic and other new methods of payment just because they are the best thing going, but because of the perceived frailties of the fiat alternative. Sadly, there will be ample evidence of that in the coming years, as Europe is sucked dry by its current crop of leaders vampires. The value and credibility of the euro is plummeting. When euro fungibility has been destroyed too, this will be another nail in the coffin of what we might call the fiat delusion – in this part of the world, at least.
Nobody wants to witness the poverty and suffering that is coming to Europe in the time to come. Let us hope that the people of Europe are finally able to understand the reasons for why it is happening and overthrow the bloodsuckers that have caused it. Europe won’t rise again until the euro is abandoned, for good, but the answer isn’t to go back to national currencies – it’s to grasp the opportunity offered to them by private, scalable and fungible alternatives like Epic.
Liberty Belle 
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