[beefman]

It's often different subsets of users in these threads. People tend to read and comment on stories they're interested in. Any bias in this interest can become amplified. For example, most commenters on stories claiming that low-level environmental pollution causes large socioeconomic effects believe the claim. Dissesnting comments are likely to be downvoted, so people with dissenting opinions don't bother commenting. Each topic becomes its own echo chamber.

There are discentralized digital currencies that don't require insane energy consumption. But since clean energy is essentially unlimited on our planet, this isn't a reason to avoid conventional blockchains (that reason would be their abysmal scaling behavior). None of them provide any price stability at all -- or wouldn't, if more than precisely zero goods and services were priced in one of them. (Certain DeFi markets have elements of a banking system that might, concievably, offer some price stability.)

The COVID-19 helicopter drops -- which were performed by the Treasury, not the Fed -- certainly could cause inflation. But this would generally be an inflationary shock, not an ongoing inflationary regime. Instead, it's the lockdowns (or hysteria more generally), which damaged the structure of the global economy. You can think of the inflation as the cost of rebuilding these networks, of convincing people to work together again. Simply put, things become cheap when they're produced by efficient networks. If those networks decay, things become more expensive.