Paying for either program will be very difficult I agree.

I didn’t make my point as clearly as I could have, and the reality of a sovereign fiat currency is so foreign to established thinking that many simply read their own assumptions into the description.

Paying for anything is the easy part once the political will exists to do so. Fiat currency isn’t dependent upon revenue, or limited in any way. Think of it much like points given at a sports stadium. The stadium neither has, nor needs any “points” to issue points. It also can not “run out of” points and never needs to retrieve points issued in order to issue them to another team.

In the case of currencies, some mechanism to retrieve points after they are issued is necessary to provide a demand for the currencies. Issuing the currency, by government provisioning itself, must come before taxation but the tax is what drives demand. If you try to hand out business cards at a meeting/convention you might not get 100% wanting your card. But, if you place an armed guard at the door and tell everyone that the price of leaving is one business card you will see everyone request one of your cards. You would effectively have created a fiat currency from your business cards.

If you obtained your cards for free in an endless supply there would be little to be gained by retrieving those handed out previously from the guard as it’s just easier to supply fresh cards as needed, so the guard would dispose of the cards collected. If some people chose to keep your card after showing it to the guard you might have an interest in keeping track of the number of cards kept and those disposed of. This number could be given a name so you could retrieve it from your spreadsheet when you wished. You could call this “debt”, just to mess with people. This is exactly how taxation works in a fiat currency. The category of debt/surplus is actually a holdover from gold standard accounting and has no real purpose now except to track the currency in the private sector. There is no obligation whatsoever to repay that number, as doing so would remove all currency from circulation and force the default of all private debt outstanding that is denominated in that currency.

Another interesting angle is how cryptocurrencies will affect the relationship between work, fiat currency, inflation, purchasing power and government. If governments don’t control the supply of said currencies (unless they are Estonia and super tech savy) we may see the end of monetary and fiscal policy as we know today.

Any cryptocurrency not issued by a government and accepted by it to pay taxes will remain a commodity, and its value will be denominated in the official currency of that government, so will never achieve “replacement” status. The only reason anyone would accept such in payment for real goods or services is the confidence that someone else will accept it in exchange for something useful to them. They are high tech grocery coupons. If you conduct all of your business in such a commodity it is essentially bartering and each transaction will have to be valued in the official currency when it is time to report income/loss to the government. Any gains will be taxed in the official currency, and only payable in that currency, but losses may not even be deductible, so it’s a good idea not to commit to 100%. The government has a very keen interest in controlling the currency of trade and the entire tax structure, including the power of the IRS, serves that purpose.

The economics and practicalities are something I wish I had more time to address in the paper, as at the end of the day getting it to work is all that matters.

I would suggest becoming intimately familiar with the functions of the current monetary system in use, and that isn’t remotely similar to what most assume it to be. The best description can be found with a little research into MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). Don’t let the word “theory” throw you, as it is an accurate description of how the US monetary system works since it adopted a fiat currency in ’71. Gravity is also described in scientific terms as “theory”.