There is something here. Ownership is a major input to behavior. In the context of SN, I tend to frame it as private property (ownership) vs a commons. Part of SN's mission (I think) is to inject more ownership into the digital commons. Private property just scales better.

I loathe litterers too. I loathe all chronic externalizers though. I find it disgusting. We used to live next to a party AirBnB and I would spend at least an hour of each day plotting revenge.

The owner of the airbnb had ownership, but her ownership had boundaries and she would knowingly "litter" outside of the boundaries. If her property were instead a commons and she were merely a member, all things being equal she would probably litter more.

It seems ownership makes people behave better but only to the extent that they internalize the costs of their ownership. Does bitcoin make people internalize its costs? Not all of them, but it does couple ownership with its benefits so bitcoiners are at least internalizing some costs of ownership. We might also argue owning an appreciating asset invests us in the future such that bitcoiners are more averse than average to future costs.

It's interesting to imagine increasing internalized costs further. Perhaps if bitcoin could only be acquired by personally mining it we'd have more end-to-end ownership. The tradeoffs of that are unclear though.