Is there evidence that plants feel pain or that bugs do not? I don't know of any, but I would definitively be interested as that could change my view. I want to go wherever the evidence leads, even if it's uncomfortable.
In either case, if plants did feel pain, would a person cause more suffering by eating plants or by eating animals that eat plants?
Would you say intelligence is the most important factor when determining whether it is ethical to cause suffering? Is it more ethical to cause suffering to an unintelligent person, like a toddler, than an intelligent one?
Are friendliness and loyalty important ethical factors? Is it more ethical to cause suffering to an unfriendly and disloyal person than a friendly and loyal one?
Small correction. Although many people think that Hal Finney could have been the creator of Bitcoin, the matter is far from settled. He even denied it himself before he passed.
This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more and more and more for no real benefit.
I've quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:
"Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated."
For years, I have been using the Inbox Zero method (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk) to stay sane. It really does help. I regularly empty my inbox while others seem stuck in the hell that is 9,000 unread emails.
I have known people to declare email bankruptcy. Why should anyone have to declare defeat to a productivity tool, let alone one that didn't exist when my parents were born?
Insanity!
Even with my successes reigning in email, I realize that I have it backwards. Technology should adapt to us, not the other way around.
A friend of mine was considering building an anonymous forwarding service and ran into this same question. He also considered allowing custom domains, but if a custom domain is used, is it really anonymous? Couldn't services coordinate to realize that all email addresses under whatever.com are owned by the same person?
In either case, if plants did feel pain, would a person cause more suffering by eating plants or by eating animals that eat plants?