[lmm]

> Talking about taking away things that people like, like airplanes and red meat and gas stoves just get people up in arms. Start with the low-hanging fruit: crypto has no value except to speculators and criminals and tax evaders.

What distinction are you drawing here? Both flying and crypto have a handful of rabid fans who use them a lot (and seem to enjoy it) while most regular people barely think about them at all, except to get vaguely irritated when they hear them passing by.

(I'm in favour of punitively high taxes on both, FWIW)

[labster]

The main distinction is that airlines generate economic activity via tourism, shipping, and cultural exchange. Cryptocoins generate mostly black market activity; corruption is generally considered bad. If airlines disappeared today, people would still travel, with more time but only one order of magnitude more energy efficiency. If BTC disappeared tomorrow, people would would make most of the same transactions with more time efficiency, and six orders of magnitude less energy.

5-10% of people take a flight every year. For the US and Australia, it’s roughly half of all people. [1] is from a climate interest group.

Supposedly 3.9% of people worldwide own cryptocoins. Thought that stays would support my argument more but I suspect lots of hodling and not much trading.

[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d30896202a18c0001b49...