The same wage that's a slap in the face to an American can be quite lucrative to someone in a lesser developed nation. Hits for pennies are a god send to those folks.
Fear of flying is actually fear of not being in control. You need to work on figuring that out - why does the lack of control freak you out? Why can't you just "go with it"? It also helps to learn some of the basics of modern aviation.
Most financial applications or experiments in the space are not conducted on the public blockchain so the oligarch aspect of it is not applicable - and no someone can't just program more money on the public blockchain - the blockchain exists to validate the amount of money flowing through it. If someone "programs more" that's essentially a fork and they can't transact with it unless other folks in the network fork as well.
It has already gained adoption outside of that sub cult. All of the major financial institutions are researching applications of blockchains - many on top of private ethereum deployments. Ethereum is PROGRAMMABLE MONEY. It's a technology that's certainly here to stay, but that's not to say that ethereum itself will be the dominant platform.
The reason it's hard to find is because the sherry cask Yamazaki won best whiskey of the year a few years ago. It was a limited batch so everyone started buying everything Japanese. The sherry cask that won used to go for ~150/bottle. Now it's $3k. Now I'm priced out of all of my favorite whiskies. Fuck you, hipsters!@