I read the Diamond Age, but I didn't finish it(Mostly because I read it in store). Someday, I'll finish it. What is really interesting to me because it feature an anarcho-capitalism model of society.
Yeah, the idea was that the government couldn't collect taxes anymore due because they couldn't get an accurate idea of what transactions were going on due to cryptography. I figured that it didn't occur to Stephenson that, if you can't crack the crypto one way or another:
http://xkcd.com/538/
You could just raise property taxes, because it's hard to encrypt land.
But Stephenson made a reference to exactly that idea in Cryptonomicon, so I don't know what he was thinking.
