The tradeoffs of the design itself sacrifice payee safety and philosophically imply that the lives of its users are secondary to socially engineering goals which they dishonestly deny are incompatible with same.

https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks

That is objectively, justifiably classifiable as manipulative and destructive.

To clarify: I assert that taxation and a functioning state, and the safety and security of the users of an online currency are absolutely not incompatible with one another—and I'm not even implicitly asserting that the definition of a "functioning state" is some kind of weird ancap impossible libertarian ideal.

Indeed, taxation today and historically is not based on mass surveillance and doesn't depend on mass surveillance.

If you're failing to pay taxes on any scale you're going to get caught by whistleblowers or by conspicuous visible purchases. Enforcement isn't 100%, of course, but it never is for any crime and it doesn't need to be.

Even if your effective tax rate is 50% evasion can only double your money at best, and you've only got taxes to pay if you've got a successful income stream-- it doesn't take much threat of imprisonment or large fines to keep someone with something to lose staying within the lines. You're already making good money (if you're not-- no taxes) so why risk your good situation for a small constant factor more?

To the extent that someone wants to engage in evasion they'd route around this surveillance system or not even worry about it: Data isn't intelligence, visible income can be offset by fake expenses (which are private in this system too!)-- and so it can't be said that this scheme's surveillance would even be particularly effective at blocking tax evasion. You'd be left with detecting it via traditional means, just as you already can even with completely private transactions, but without the privacy loss.

So it's a non-solution to a non-problem, that create significant privacy related collateral harm. But even then I wouldn't complain about it except for the misleading presentation of it as a privacy system.