Dear Mr Saylor and Mr Musk,

Over the years I have seen far too many heroes mercilessly slayed by Bitcoin’s immune system, because they failed to understand or adhere to first principles.
Teaming up with the blacklisting miners and forming the Bitcoin Mining Council gives many of us, OG Bitcoiners, déjà vu. It seems like you are struggling with a particular first principle, therefore I conclude the balls of the bulls are in great danger, UNLESS you learn that 1 BTC = 1 BTC. Also called the FUNGIBILITY principle.

What is the best money we might conceptualize?

Thousands of years ago, an Athenian gentleman, Aristotle, identified the Properties of Good Money. Although economists are still debating the details, the basic idea is this: money must be durable, divisible, scarce, stable, acceptable, portable, and fungible.
Bitcoin — or another cryptocurrency, but most likely Bitcoin, and certainly not Dogecoin — will flippen the USD and become the most valuable currency. With the exceptions of stability, acceptability, portability and fungibility, Bitcoin fulfils the properties of good money. I regard stability and acceptability as meta properties. As the market capitalization of a currency grows, these properties get satisfied. Portability is also something well incentivized to be taken care of, although the challenges of making Bitcoin cheap and fast are far from trivial, the brainpower⚡ directed towards achieving these goals is extraordinary.
This leaves us with fungibility as the primary property to focus. The most important thing one can choose to work on is Bitcoin’s fungibility.

Money in its various guises derives its usefulness from the fact that one can be relatively certain that a dollar received is a dollar able to be spent without friction or uncertainty — Alastair Berg [src]

Fungibility contributes to the quality of money.
Fungibility is a scale. It tells how interchangeable and indistinguishable individual units of a money are. In his 2019 paper, economist Alastair Berg states “That the fungibility of money reduces the costs of exchange is well explored (Brunner and Meltzer, 1971; see also Banerjee and Maskin, 1996, p.958; Menger, 1892)”.
This does not come as a surprise as contravening fungibility violates the fundamentals of money. It introduces friction in exchanges and makes people question their belief in the money itself. Berg continues, “Fiat currency derives its usefulness from the likelihood that it will be acceptable in some future exchange, rather than having any intrinsic value or secondary uses.”

Fungibility of a currency ensures privacy of the individual.
Privacy is the individual’s ability to reveal themselves selectively to the world. The adjective private is often used synonymously with the adjective secret. However, the latter’s noun form, secrecy, fails to capture the meaning of privacy, which leads to confusion over the terminology. A more legal strand of definitions emerged in 1890, when privacy was first proposed to be a fundamental human right and defined as “the right to be let alone.”
A currency lacking fungibility takes away the individual’s freedom to keep their financial matters personal and define the boundaries of their financial life; therefore, lack of financial privacy is a direct consequence of inferior fungibility.

In Conclusion

Fungibility is king in Bitcoin. Do not confuse the apparent lack of privacy in the system with a feature. It's not a feature, it's a bug, or rather a compromise, a result of some tradeoffs. Everyone in the community strongly values the privacy of the individual and so should you. Remember: 1 BTC = 1 BTC.

Don't shy away from diving deeper into the ocean of nyms and identities, check out my latest essay on Privacy, Fungibility and Anonymity.