But this is an even worse argument than usual - the people speculating with crypto constructs are very often also part of the groups who consume a whole lot of meat...

You are off by 3 orders of magnitude. Bitcoin alone validates 7 million transactions monthly. If there were only 50k users, an average user would be sending 140 transactions per month.

You are not making a great case here.

Patently false. For example an "average" processor like Western Union processes only 25 million transactions monthly.

"with the option of reversal"

Which is the whole problem. Bitcoin is irreversible, by design. That's crucial.

Modern agricultural harvesting and processing always has a bykill of small mammals and ground nesting birds.

Organic farming often uses companion planting to attract natural predators of insect pests, so that insecticides don't need to be used (as much anyway, there's plenty of rather toxic compounds that are perfectly natural and organic yet kill things well, like derris dust).

How, though, do you distinguish between the suffering of cows, and the suffering of a dormouse, or the suffering of caterpillars that are being eaten from inside by the larvae of a parasitic wasp?

Are you basing your morality on "there's an arbitrary level of suffering I'll accept" or "I'm only opposed to the suffering of life that has at least N neurons?"

Or are you sweeping the path as you walk lest an ant be harmed?

Once again, it's not just a simple case of "all animal husbandry is unsustainable", but we need to pick apart why the unsustainable practices have been developed into what they are now.

My gut feeling is that Government subsidies of corn in the US create an oversupply of it, so sure, why not feed it to cattle?

It's not like the American beef industry was predicated on grain feeding, it started with ranchers grazing them on prairies.

So what changed?

Crypto contributes nothing but a speculative asset to society.

Meat production, while derailed into unsustainability, has a lot more utility and is also a lot harder to unwind from current culture. Try running a survey on which of the two people would rather forego, and your 100M to 6B ratio will look rather stupid.

One shitty behavior doesn't excuse another.

We will have to agree to disagree that stimulating the taste buds has more utility than providing a trustless financial system.

What's the point of a currency that doesn't scale and that everyone is too afraid to spend because of volatility.

Speculative asset, that's all you'll ever have there.

Didn't have that one on my bingo card...