well yeah, but rules that depend on a lot of things that won't be in the block chain.
if you just take for example net investment income/loss.. . investment property income (rent), minus expenses (mortgage interest, repairs, water rates, council rates, agent fees, travel costs, depreciation)
whatever that net figure is, it comes off your total declared income for the year and therefore you pay less tax out of the income ...
or vehicle expenses, where you claim your vehicle expenses depending on how many work km you do - which depends on a human identifying kilometers for work vs kilometers for personal.
and of course all of that only applies to Australia. how would it handle your taxes when you're based in Finland? or how about someone that is american, where it doesn't matter where they live, they still have to pay US taxes regardless (though they can claim credits for taxes paid abroad from what I understand).
and who maintains it when no doubt each year there is a tax change somewhere, in some country around the world?
Yes it isn't beyond the realms of possibility - but the complexity in the way the tax world works today makes it almost insurmountable. It would almost be impossible for something like this to be decentralized.
But, it need not be decentralised, it can be on a public owned/national system and clean up 'within the borders' first. It just has to be able to manage all of the current transactions to begin with.
so a sovereign cryptocurrency, say for example, created by australia, to replace the national currency?
that would be a lot more manageable - except the government would never want to give out that kind of transparency :)
and they would lose central bank functionality, which is pretty much just based on issuing new
currencygovernment bondsand the value of the crypto dollar would then actually be real, dependent on how much supply demand there is - which is again something the government wouldn't want.
yes.. I got 99 problems, 98 of them are middlemen.
which leads us to the next reason it will never happen. The government has no motivation - they like the way things are now.
They'd only do something this as a reactionary measure when crypto starts to take over - and by then it would be too late.