You can see where your tax dollars go now (except for the classified items, but even there you can see the totals). You can get detailed breakdowns of nearly everything, including salaries. For example, you can see every NYC employee salary here https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls. If you want, you can scroll through the massive list of federal, state, local gov contracts on a variety of websites today. For example, Florida state gov contracts https://www.dms.myflorida.com/contract_search

But the fact is, (almost) no one really cares. Many people want to believe they would care, but they don't really. Either way, knowing what's being spent where only makes corruption marginally more difficult. It certainly doesn't lead citizens to be any more engaged. We know this because what you want is already here and it has solved precisely nothing (IMO).

Very solid points.

I personally think the engagement part would come instead from "My $5000 in tax went through the system and was eventually spent on a federal initiative I don't agree with" (or since it's all granular: "only $13 of that $5000 went to anything that benefits my community?"). No, I'm not saying that everyone will care, but I think that more people will care.

I live in Florida, so they only non-federal tax I pay is property tax. (Excluding sales taxes, of course.) Every year, I get a full breakdown of exactly what mils go where with the bill. I bet we would have something similar at the federal level by now, except that stupidly we have to do the whole "guess the number I'm think of" game with the IRS instead of them sending a bill.

We could do that without bitcoin. Lot of things we can do, like make democracy more direct by allowing people to vote on issues from an app on their phone. The technology is there.

The difficulty with that is getting trusted information published, not storing it in a secured manner.

If citizens paid in COUNTRYCOIN (publicly-visible blockchain-based currency), all spending was done in COUNTRYCOIN, and all government loans (in or out) were in COUNTRYCOIN, then trusted information would be integral to the whole system.

Yes a contractor could still charge $10k for a hammer, but citizens would uncover that almost immediately.