[beeflet]

You don't need to implement a sales or income tax in order to subsidize the government's operations. One proposal by "single tax" based on property tax, proposed by a certain Henry George has interesting merits. One such merit is that it is pretty hard to hide from a property tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

I think that in this century we've become accustomed to the existing credit card payment systems that have access to all of our payment data and are allowed to do with it what they wish (and by extension, the government also can subpoena our payment data in investigations). But if you look back in history this is a pretty new idea. Giving the government access to every single payment you make is pretty dangerous if you have a change of regime into something more authoritarian like in the case of China.

I think that if cryptocurrency can provide about the same level of fungibility and privacy as ordinary cash, that would be fine. You can track marked bills with some level of effort (kind of analogous to an EAE attack in the cryptocurrency world) but the general principle is that not every transaction is automatically logged in some easily inspectable database and sold to the highest bidder.