Technical feasibility of regulating public Blockchain explored

I built a self driving car. The only human discretion is the steering wheel.

As an authority, you express your policy goals via a set of rules which grants you a fine policy-making abilities, and then either the market takes you into account and self-regulate to respect your policy or they give you ground for a global ban (but most likely some people will endorse it through fear and the others will have no other choice than to follow or be the one with the "hot potato" (divide&conquer) ).

But as every good tool/technology there are always multiple facets, and it can also be used to create value :

The beauty of decorating the ledger is that it allows to tie ethic to money. For example you can define some decoration rules, which can help promote environmental practices. For example you receive green coins when you donate to wwf, or when you interact with an eco-friendly business. (green token aren't new but the fact of it being public info is)

The great strength of this is that you are no longer bounded to be a summing to zero ledger for your decorated coins.

It can also helps people to cluster and transact only with people which shares some common values. For example if you want to avoid touching drug related money, then you can choose not to.

You can also reward with some coins certain behavior, like transactions between different communities which create out of thin-air coins received by both parties. It gives you fine knobs to adjust your economy.

You can build an e-reputation system upon these.

It probably can be exploited but it's not so easy as because all the books are public it removes incentives to cheat as you risk being marked.

You can create "coins that can't be bought". It is kind of fingerprinting your economic behavior to tell society what you want it to become.

If you can convince some people to share some set of values these rainbow coins can help you smoothly go from "ignored by society" values to values which can bring you new customers.

If the most dramatic consequences you had to face from the past decade policies, you're probably pretty affluent among the Greeks (which isn't surprising here on HN, I don't think anyone here is part of the 30% lower incomes of his country)

> I simply struggle to accept that an individual should suffer the consequences of an incompetent or malicious government in what should be a fundamental right (trading and securing your wealth)

You're free to assign the priority you want in the role of State, depending on the personal believes and values, but I personally think there are more fundamental rights than trading or securing your wealth, and I'm not shocked to see a government making trade-offs between those rights.

In normal time, all those rights should be preserved and defended, but in troubled times it, I have no problem seeing a government cutting back the free trade right in order to provide food to everyone, or education, health, safety or whatever human basic rights I feel more important than business freedom. Call me a socialist if you want.

I don't live in Greece any more but no, I was earning a slightly above average full-time wage -which when you don't have a family, pay rent or care to go out much might feel pretty affluent, but if you have to support a family or pay rent because you don't want to live with your parents any more, is not.

My perspective is also the perspective of many people I know in Greece that are definitely not affluent (some earning sub €800 per month):

If you're lucky to have a stable job, you are working all day long to get a half-decent wage (that over the last decade lost 40% of it's effective value through tax increases, health contribution increases towards a completely broken health system, pension contribution increases -that you literally don't trust that you will get back, inflation, etc) and can't even do whatever the fuck you want with whatever little is left of it! They are strong-arming you to keep it in banks, transact through banks -accepting their fees and inconveniences-, restrict how much cash you can withdraw or spend, even limit what you can buy! They are still blocking Greek card transactions outside the country for a series of types of business such as gambling, pornographic, jewels, works of art, auctions, etc (which of course they fail to detect properly, so you get plenty of false positives :p)

Is this the most dramatic consequence considering everything else I just mentioned? Probably not, but it's the one that constantly reminds you that you're not in control of the rewards of your own labor. And it's also the one that you can suddenly avoid for good, giving them the finger, thanks to cryptocurrencies.

> Call me a socialist if you want.

Socialist policies can work great if a government is competent and honest like perhaps in Scandinavian countries. The problem is that no-one can guarantee when and for how long a government will be like this.