I think people are getting tripped up on the difference between "fictional" and...I dunno..."fungible"? In a sense all money is fictional, but obviously despite

I think people are getting tripped up on the difference between "fictional" and...I dunno..."fungible"? In a sense all money is fictional, but obviously despite that no one is willing to trade a $10 bill for my $1 bill. So taxing people differently for having $10 vs $1 might make sense. But $10 and ten $1 bills are equivalent. A tax that applied to one and not the other would be very weird; it's not clear what behavior it's meant to encourage, and anyway lots of people would avoid paying it. So the argument above is that "realizing" gains is a lot like getting change for a dollar bill. I don't know whether that's right, but anyway it's different from arguing about whether money is real :)